Stacked Deck

by Tracy Watkins

  “Allez-vous en! Allenz-vous en!” She was yelling for him to go away.

  “I love you,” he yelled back. “Je t’aime! Je t’aime!”

  He tore directly at the house, then at the last second did another wild turn, ripping up lawn and anything in his path, whooping it up and hoping no bullets came flying at him.

  Chapter 31

  B eth angled toward a side door, leaving Giambi to the back.

  The racket out front continued. When JD said he was going to raise hell, she didn’t realize how far he would take it. The van was running down everything in sight, horn blasting, JD yelling out the window.

  Behind her the tractor was making its own noise.

  She ducked under the line of sight of the windows, then straightened up at the screen door. It was old, desperately in need of paint and she wondered how loud it would screech when she pulled it opened.

  She hit the screen with the gun hard enough to tear it away from the wood. She reached in and undid the latch. The main door wasn’t locked.

  When she opened it, a cat squirted out, startling her and sending her heart racing. The cat scampered off into the field.

  Beth stepped into the kitchen. The knot in her stomach tightened. She smelled the stale aroma of coffee and bacon.

  Dishes in the sink.

  How many were there?

  Four plates. Maybe one for Kaya?

  She hoped so. Jesus, four of them would not be good.

  She heard the chaos out front, the men inside talking angrily to Giambi’s daughter.

  Don’t shake. Hold the damn gun steady. What do I do? Just tell them to surrender? And then if they don’t?

  Where’s Giambi?

  I don’t like this, Beth thought.

  Beth, her gun in front of her, gripped in both hands, moved forward toward the hall.

  Grandfather clock, pendulum swinging. Ticktock, ticktock. So loud now that her senses had heightened.

  Then she saw something in her peripheral vision. Someone moving from the center room. Giambi was now ahead of her.

  She was wondering exactly what he would do, when it all just came apart. She couldn’t tell who shot first.

  The crash of gunfire enveloped the room. Screams. Yelling. Men going this way and that.

  Giambi just standing there shooting.

  His daughter, being held by one of the men in front of the window, screamed and jumped to the side and down.

  Outside, passing the window, she saw the van continuing it’s mad dash, tearing the place up, with JD whooping and beeping the horn.

  One of the two men she could see turned. Vincenzio. Then he and Giambi exchanged fire. Both went down.

  Then the other man, the one who’d been holding Kaya, swung toward Beth and she shot him before he could even bring his weapon to bare.

  But then Vincenzio, wounded but still in the fight, grabbed Kaya and screamed for Beth to throw her gun down or he would kill Kaya.

  Before Beth could react, Giambi’s daughter made a violent attempt to pull away, exposing him. Giambi, still down on the floor, shot Vincenzio in the chest three times.

  Suddenly it was quiet.

  Even JD had stopped his antics. A weird stillness filled the house. The smell of cordite stung Beth’s nostrils. Her heart was beating like crazy and she could hear the blood rushing past her ears.

  Giambi, bleeding from the shoulder, used the chair nearest him to get to his feet. He kicked the gun on the floor away from the man Beth had shot, then went over to check on Vincenzio.

  Four plates. Not for serving, but at places. Four.

  Beth turned and there he was coming down the staircase with a shotgun. The third man.

  The barrel turned through a shaft of sunlight, the grease on the stock giving off a bright flash.

  He had on a white T-shirt. He seemed slow.

  Beth aimed to fire.

  Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong.

  In that split second she thought maybe this was a relative. An uncle or someone come to help them and that made her hesitate.

  He wasn’t looking at her, he was looking at Giambi, who had his back to the man.

  He seemed ready to pull the trigger when he saw her out of the corner of his eye and jerked the shotgun toward her. She pulled the trigger.

  The man fired as he fell, the deafening blast hitting the ceiling. Pieces fell in a tiny cloud of dust.

  Beth turned to Kaya, fearful of learning who she’d shot. “Is he one of them?” She hoped for the right answer.

  “Yes. He…he has a problem with his bowels. He’s been on the toilette all morning. He’s the leader. Who are you?”

  Beth didn’t answer. She turned to Giambi. “You’re hit.”

  “Minor scratch.”

  JD came in the door with a tire iron in his hand. He looked around at the carnage. “Jesus!”

  “The men are dead. I don’t know if they have somebody else out there. Go up to the road and watch, make sure nobody comes.”

  “Everybody okay?”

  “Giambi got nicked in the arm. You did a great job distracting them. They were looking out that way when we came in behind them.”

  “I’m nothing if not a prime-time distracter,” JD said as he headed back outside.

  “Take a gun with you,” Giambi yelled.

  JD looked around at the weapons on the floor and picked the one closest to him.

  Then he retreated back to the van.

  Beth turned to Kaya. “Salvatore will explain it to you. I’ll leave you two alone.”

  Beth went out the back door. She started to shake in a delayed reaction to the violence. She took a couple of deep breaths as she stepped out on the porch and went down the steps.

  The farmer had moved some distance away but had stopped and was staring at the house. She walked out to meet him.

  “I thought you’d all be dead,” he said. “Every one of you.”

  “You have it about right, just the wrong group.”

  “Kaya is okay?”

  “Yes, she’s fine. Her father is slightly wounded. The others are dead.” She told him the situation was under control and the authorities were on their way.

  “If you don’t want to get involved, maybe you should just go home.”

  “Yes, I think I will do that.”

  “I appreciate what you did even if it was against your will.”

  “I’m happy she’s not hurt. She’s a good neighbor. A good woman. Who were they?”

  “We don’t know yet. Maybe we won’t know. Giambi has many enemies.”

  His eyes turned to the house and he seemed to be wondering what that would mean for Kaya sometime down the road. “The Germans once occupied that house during World War Two. I was three then, so I don’t have memories of it the way my father does. It has a history. In World War One it was the English.”

  Now she turned and looked at the house, but with a different perspective. She imagined it in the hands of the English. Then the Germans. It always astounded her that World War II, with all the incredible and horrific things that had happened, was not very far back in history. That a man who was now only in his sixties could have been born then. In the middle of it.

  “Au revoir.”

  “Au revoir.”

  He started his tractor up and headed across the field toward his own farmhouse, at least a quarter mile away.

  She watched him for a time, admiring the life he was living, the nature of the man and his machine.

  As she was returning she received a call from the federal agent. They were airborne in a chopper coming from Nice and wanted to know what had happened. She told them Giambi’s condition and the situation on the ground.

  When she went back into the house, Giambi and his daughter were in the kitchen talking intensely. Kaya had his shirt cut away and was looking at the wound.

  She glanced up at Beth. “He says you’re some kind of CIA agent.”

  “He’s wrong about that. But it doesn’t mat
ter.” Beth turned to Giambi. “The feds are on their way. I want that name before you go.”

  “You’ll have it.”

  Kaya finished wrapping the wound on his left arm. She looked at Beth. “What are the American FBI doing here?”

  “They’re coming for your father.”

  “Arresting him?”

  “No. To protect him.”

  “They’re a little late.”

  Beth nodded. “He’s got other problems. This was just one of them.”

  She went back outside to talk to JD.

  Beth felt the weight of the silence. The fields were still. Even the air and the dust hanging in the sunlight seemed frozen in the aftermath of the violence.

  She felt like she had come upon some great and terrible accident and was looking now at the dead, trying to make sense of the carnage.

  JD was leaning against the van watching her as she approached. “He give you the name?”

  “Not yet. He’s talking with his daughter.”

  The chopper showed up about fifteen minutes later, whoomping across the sky.

  Giambi and Kaya came out of the house. Then he went to the van and took out a small suitcase and gave it to his daughter.

  Beth could really see the resemblance in them, not so much in their faces, but in the cut of their bodies and the style of their walking.

  The chopper settled on the edge of the nearby field, throwing dirt and weeds up in a storm. When it calmed down, three FBI agents got out, ducking their heads as people instinctively do when leaving a chopper whose blades are still swirling, even if very slow and a safe distance above them.

  Beth shook hands with the agent in charge and explained the situation. The AIC said not to worry, that they had an arrangement with the French. The men in the house would be removed and this would become a nonevent as far as Giambi’s daughter was concerned.

  “It would be a good idea for you and JD Hawke to disappear.”

  “We’re on our way.”

  “Good.”

  Beth didn’t ask what the arrangement was, but assumed there were all kinds of such arrangements going on between intelligence agencies.

  Giambi said goodbye to his daughter. She was very matter-of-fact about it. Beth didn’t know what she might be feeling inside. Kaya had to be seriously traumatized by the entire affair.

  Giambi then went over to JD and shook his hand and patted him on the shoulder. “Good luck with your career. I expect to see you win a lot of races.”

  Then he came over to Beth. He took out a small envelope and handed it to her. “As promised.”

  She took the envelope from him, stared at it for a moment, then put in it her purse. “Thank you.”

  “Remember what I said.”

  “I will. I’m sorry it comes to this for you, Salvatore. I hope they take good care of you.”

  “I’ll be seventy-nine in a month. Maybe I should just be happy I got this far. Nothing is guaranteed in this life except the end. I’m happy that I met you. You’re an extraordinary lady and I will think about you often.”

  “I won’t forget the tango. Take care of yourself. Remember, you still have fifteen good years left.”

  He smiled sadly. “The last tango in Monaco. Old casino guys like me, as General MacArthur said of old soldiers, we don’t die, we just fade away. Have a great life. I mean that from the bottom of my heart. Don’t let anything stop you from getting what you want. And don’t let the past hold you back. You have real quality. You deserve it all. Go get it.”

  She was shocked to see how wide his eyes opened, how clear they were, and that they had moisture in them as he stared at her. He looked at her not from cold gray gun turrets now, but from some other, highly emotional place.

  He bent in his elegant way and kissed her lightly on the cheek, held her in his moist gaze, and then he walked away, a tall, proud, well-appointed man who wore his clothes as few men she’d ever met. He gathered his bags, then joined the agents in the helicopter. He flew away with them to whatever life he had left.

  She stood for a long time staring at the chopper until it vanished over the hills in the direction of Nice.

  “He was something else,” JD said. “Not many like Salvatore Giambi.”

  They said goodbye to Kaya. JD apologized for messing up her lawn and she said it had saved her life and not to worry about it. They left her there waiting for the French authorities to show up.

  “You aren’t going to look in the envelope, see who it is you’re going after next?” JD asked.

  “No hurry now. I’ll do it later. I want to wind down, relax, have some fun. The minute I know who I’m after, the hunt begins. I need some rest and recuperation first.”

  Plenty of time, she thought.

  The man whose name was on the piece of paper would be there when she got back. Plenty of time. After sixteen years a few more days wouldn’t matter.

  The only thing she wanted to do right now was get away from all of it, become somebody else for a couple days, and not think about anything. Go to clubs, bars, cafés. Sleep all morning. Make love all night.

  And forget the name in the envelope until she was on a plane home.

  “Paris, here we come,” JD said as they got into the van.

  “Let’s not go to Paris.”

  “I thought you wanted to do Paris.”

  “What’s that little town we drive through on the way from Nice to Monaco…where Bono lives.”

  “Côte d’Azur?”

  “Yes. Let’s go there.”

  Chapter 32

  I t was funny. Now the last thing she wanted was glitter and glitz, trendiness and floods of tourists milling about in the great urban hustle of Paris, Cannes or Nice.

  She wanted quiet. Old-style, Medieval quiet. With artists wandering about on cobblestone streets in a bohemian atmosphere beneath the shadows of stone citadels with dark passages. After making love she wanted to walk along the quay where the Mediterranean looked as it had for about five hundred years or so. She wanted to eat at the Josy-Jo restaurant in Haut de-Cagnes and Le Cagnard. Then stroll where Renoir and Nietzsche and a thousand artists and thinkers had walked.

  They got a room at the portside Hotel Welcome on the Villefranche-sur-Mer.

  Before doing anything else, Beth made a complete report to Delphi about her success with Salvatore Giambi. With the information obtained about the Queen of Hearts assassin from Boston that Giambi tried to kill in Phoenix, Beth knew Delphi would send an agent to Boston to probe deeper into the Queen of Hearts’s background, now able to connect the dots.

  Another agent would no doubt be dispensed to Puerto Isla where Giambi’s blackmail payments had been sent over the years. From his financial records they knew no one had made a withdrawal in the past three years since the dictator of Puerto Isla had been overthrown. What did that mean?

  Madame Web, Arachne, Weaver, the Queen of Hearts. One and the same? No matter the answer, the deadly game of tracking the woman was now going to be easier thanks to Beth’s work.

  As much as she wanted to open that envelope, she refused. Once she saw the name she knew it would be almost impossible for her to enjoy this quaint spot.

  JD didn’t understand how she could do it. “What if the hotel burns down? What if there’s no name and he was just playing games with you? How can you sleep knowing the secret is right there?”

  “I’ve been waiting sixteen years. I can wait a couple of days,” she repeated. But she did keep the envelope in the hotel safe, just in case.

  It took a bath, making love, then a dinner, a few drinks, and finally a long walk along the quay to begin to escape the long day. By morning the past and future had all been dissolved. Now they were just there, in this beautiful place on the Mediterranean.

  Slowly the tension drained out of them. They began to have some serious here-and-now-and-nothing-else fun and that’s precisely what she needed.

  JD told her a dozen times that he loved her chameleonlike changes. She was a new
woman for him every day. Sometimes twice a day. He said he felt like he was with five hot young women. Men like variety and she was the definition of variety. He couldn’t decide which one he liked best, the feisty redhead or the wild blonde, or maybe the intellectual with the glasses, bobbed hair, severe suit and a passion for making love in secret places outside their room.

  It was mad sex, crazy fun. And then it was over and time for them to return to their respective realities. Still, both of them knew this wasn’t the end.

  “I want you to come to Toronto if I have a seat by then,” he said. She promised that she would. He told her to be careful with her hunt. He didn’t want to see her get killed. She promised to be careful. It was all very civilized.

  Then he was gone and she was on board the flight out of Nice and on her way home, the envelope still unopened in her shoulder bag. It had been a week like no other.

  Only when she was on the final leg of her journey, many long hours and two plane changes later, the America West aircraft beginning its descent to McCarran International in Vegas, only then did she finally decide it was time.

  Beth reached into her purse and pulled out the envelope. She hoped she would take Giambi’s advice and seek justice rather than personal revenge. That would depend, she imagined, on how things played out.

  She held the envelope and thought about it for a moment. There were choices here. She could just not open it. That was an option. Just let it go.

  But that thought lasted only until she remembered again what had been done to her father.

  So she did it. She opened the envelope.

  There were two pieces of folded paper. On the first was a note from Salvatore Giambi. A confession of love for her. An old man’s passion for a young woman.

  You have broken my heart, beautiful lady. I will suffer every moment of every day for the rest of my life.

  How sweet. Pushing eighty and still an incurable romantic.

  She opened the second piece of folded paper.

  On it was the name of the man whose identity she’d been seeking all her adult life. The man who had ordered the death of her father sixteen years ago.

  Salvatore Giambi.

  She stared at it, stunned.