Redemption Key (A Dani Britton Thriller)

by S. G. Redling

  ALSO BY S.G. REDLING

  The Widow File

  Flowertown

  Damocles

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2014 S.G. Redling

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477819609

  ISBN-10: 1477819606

  Cover design by becker&mayer! LLC

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013919786

  For Gina Milum, the best friend anyone could hope for

  CONTENTS

  JINKY’S INLET FISHING CAMP, REDEMPTION KEY, FLORIDA

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JINKY’S INLET FISHING CAMP, REDEMPTION KEY, FLORIDA

  Wednesday, August 21

  4:38am, 74° F

  Dani lay on her back listening to the night sounds of the island, sensing the changing tide by the shifting breeze. She lay on the floating kayak dock, the rough indoor-outdoor carpet scratching her bare shoulders. In the hazy moonlight she could make out the shapes of date palms and sea grape around the inlet. No lights shone from the low buildings around her. Somewhere to her left, gravel crunched once, twice, and Dani tensed, turning her head to stare into the shadows. She didn’t move. She didn’t breathe.

  The breeze shifted again, blowing clouds out of the way, letting moonlight fall on a pair of tiny Key deer picking their way across the parking lot. They lifted their heads, catching her scent, deciding if she was a threat. It seemed they didn’t want to risk it and hurried along down the rutted road deeper into the island.

  She knew how they felt. She knew that watchfulness.

  At least now she was able to stay in one place, to keep herself from bolting into the darkness to find another place, a safer place, a place that wasn’t where she was at the moment. There was no safer place. She was her safest place. She stretched her left hand out to the edge of the bobbing dock and felt the warm water at her fingertips.

  She was her safe zone, her only safe zone, and she knew how to defend it.

  Dani sighed and sat up. No more sleep was coming tonight. And if it did she knew it would bring with it visions of blue eyes and strangling hands and she’d just claw her way out of the dream again. She woke up in a knot of sheets every night when the heat and the dreams overpowered her and only lying by the warm, still waters would soothe her.

  Funny, she thought, that after nearly drowning, she loved being in the water more than ever. Of course, the warm tides of the islands were a far cry from the filthy, icy water of the Tidal Basin in Washington, DC. And she still had no memory of actually going into the water, just fevered ghosts of memories of hanging over the water, pain and terror suffocating her. They told her she had taken in a lungful of water, that she’d have drowned before she bled to death, that it was the iciness of the water that had saved her.

  She didn’t consciously remember the water but her body remembered the cold. Her core temperature had dropped dangerously low and now it seemed her body couldn’t shake that chill. She could never be warm enough.

  5:40am, 78° F

  Oren would have checked his watch if he still wore one. As it was, his employee made as good a timepiece as the rising and setting sun. He peeled his tangerine, tossing the rinds into the water below the deck out back of his bar, and watched the sky brighten in the east. He squinted into the darker western horizon, toward the bridge over the open water, listening for the sound he’d come to expect. Right on time.

  She’d gotten faster in the months since she’d started working for him. She ran hard and she ran fast and she never stopped for anything or anyone. She didn’t even wave, not to him or anyone else on the island. He didn’t mind. A person would have to be lacking some pretty basic survival instincts to want to intrude on the look in her eyes as she ran.

  He remembered her labored breathing and stiff-legged limp those first few weeks. Back then he’d been sure she would give up the fight. You didn’t have to be a doctor to recognize that big knot of scar tissue on her thigh. You didn’t have to be a cop, either, to figure out what had caused it. The wide, ugly webbing of scars on her left shoulder was a little harder to explain, but Oren hadn’t survived as long as he had by not knowing how to keep his curiosity in check.

  He spit tangerine seeds over the railing as the pounding steps went silent on the middle of the bridge. In the pre-dawn haze, he could just make out her dark form against the sun-bleached concrete, the little light she clipped to her shorts flickering like a beacon. Late spring, early summer, when the sky brightened earlier, he would watch her stop on the bridge, bending and stretching, before she would stare down into the water.

  The first time he’d seen what came next, he’d nearly shit himself.

  With no preamble, she launched herself over the railing, falling feet first nearly fifteen feet into the channel.

  He popped another segment of fruit into his mouth as he waited for her to resurface. She swam with the current today, crossing a hundred and twenty or so yards from the bridge to the dock below him. She alternated swimming styles; sometimes she swam with a strong, fast crawl, sometimes she’d return to his dock swimming most of the way underwater. Today was an underwater day. He’d watched her get better at that too. Once, he’d even tried to hold his breath the whole time she swam, but years of smoking all sorts of things had made that impossible.

  He spit some more seeds and heard her splashing around below him. This was his favorite part. He eyed the crossbeam of the deck awning overhead as it creaked when a rope she’d tied there went taut and he resisted the urge to look over the railing. Of all the things he’d watched her struggle with, this seemed the most impossible. Seemed. It had taken weeks for her to clear the water and months before she’d taken her feet out of the effort. Now she barely even breathed hard as she pulled herself hand over hand up the rope, oblivious to the sea slime that slicked the way.

  Water poured off of her body, her black tank top and black nylon shorts clinging to her as one brown hand after another gripped and pulled and climbed. She crossed her feet at the ankles, her entire body bent with the effort. She scraped her shoulder as she always did when she pulled herself over the railing of the deck, ignoring Oren and the water she flung around her. He let himself admire the tight curve of her ass when she twisted on the rope, lifting herself over his head, and watched her haul herself up all the way to the awning. Hey, he was old; he wasn’t dead, and a man would have to be awfully
close to the grave to not appreciate a sight like this. She pulled and twisted higher and higher until her head came level with the crossbeam.

  She closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against the wooden beam, her mouth moving around words he couldn’t hear over the breeze. She wrapped her legs around the rope, looping it around her feet to hold her weight. She slapped the beam with each hand. He wondered if her plan was to figure out a way to hold the rope with just her feet and slap the beam with both hands at once. It wouldn’t surprise him, just like it wouldn’t surprise him to see her achieve it.

  Kicking her feet free, she loosened her grip and shimmied down the rope until her bottom landed on the railing. She was short and he smiled at the big leap she needed to make to land on the deck from the chest-high top rail. Only then did she acknowledge his presence and even then all he got was a nod. He handed her a tangerine.

  “Thanks, boss.” She pushed her thumb into the peel. He remembered how her hands used to shake after climbing off the rope.

  “Sure thing, Dani. Gonna need you this morning for a meeting. The fucking Wheeler boys.”

  6:10am, 78° F

  Dani liked her job here at Jinky’s. She liked the busyness of it, the mindlessness of the work. She’d never seen a stranger set-up for an organization, and she’d never seen a bar open so early. Jinky’s was a fishing camp on a mostly forgotten island in the Lower Keys. The little inlet took up less room than a football field, with slips to hold eight boats, maximum, at high season, which had passed two months before. Still, the bait shop and sundry store on the ground floor opened every morning at sixish, the bar above it opening right after to serve fishermen and kayakers and random hikers egg sandwiches and orange juice and beer to go. They served the locals rum drinks before dawn and mojitos to take the edge off the heat of the day, and if they were breaking any of the state’s liquor laws, nobody saw the need to make a fuss.

  It had been nine months since she’d left DC; almost six since she’d moved up from Key West, and the world she inhabited now felt lifetimes away from both. She’d fled to Key West, lured by the promise of being at the very farthest end of the continental US, just ninety miles from Cuba, all the signs promised. But when she got there, she felt no relief.

  Part of her understood that she was the problem—that she couldn’t shake the sense of being pursued, of being watched and hunted. She liked Key West, liked the live-and-let-live attitude of the crowded little island, but all those people kept her off-balance. Her weak shoulder and slowly ebbing limp made her feel vulnerable. The locals took her edginess in stride, the island being something of a haven for eccentrics of all stripes, but the tourists were a different story. They wanted chipper and charming; they wanted local color and expected her, as a waitress, to oblige with smiles and flirtation.

  She did her best. Well, she did okay until one broad-chested man in a pack of broad-chested men had insisted on taking her picture with his cell phone. Once, she’d let it slide. Twice, and she asked him to stop. By the sixth time he’d waved that phone in her face, clicking and clicking and laughing and hooting, the edges of Dani’s vision had gone dark. When she’d heard the phones of the men around her chirping at the arrival of her picture in their message boxes, she’d found it hard to hear much more.

  And when the photographer put his hand on the back of her neck? She still didn’t remember what had happened after that. She just knew it ended up with his broken nose and her unemployment. Dani knew she had to leave.

  And so she’d driven north, the only direction available to her. She drove over bridge after bridge, over channels and through Keys with names like Boca Chica and Summerland, Sugarloaf, Shark, and Ramrod. She gripped the wheel tightly, back in survival mode, willing her mind to corral her thoughts, to line them up into manageable compartments. It was a skill she’d acquired as a child, the ability to segment her thoughts. That skill had gotten her the job at Rasmund and that skill had kept her alive when hell rained down on her last November. By the time she pulled onto Big Pine Key, she’d willed herself into a tear-inducing headache. By the time she pulled into the parking lot of the Walgreens, her hands shook so badly she could barely turn off the car.

  When she’d pulled back out and continued driving, she couldn’t face the early spring traffic, so she’d turned left instead of right, went farther into the island than through it, and found herself following signs for the Key Deer Refuge. That sounded better than miles of tourists on a highway with nothing but the rest of the United States ahead of her, so she’d let herself drift along narrow roads sheltered and shadowed with bougainvillea and date palms. One turn after another, she tried and succeeded at getting lost. That’s when she came to the crossroad.

  If she went left, if she followed the state-manufactured sign, she would be on No Name Key. That sounded good. But if she went right, if she followed a faded wooden sign that pointed down a rutted, narrow road, she would find Redemption.

  That sounded better.

  So Dani Britton had rolled her sixteen-year-old Honda over the concrete bridge and onto the gravel-covered property of Jinky’s Fishing Camp not fifteen minutes after a water heater had ruptured in one of the little rental units. A white-haired man in his late fifties had handed her a mop while swearing a blue streak, and six months later, here she was. The white-haired man was Mr. Oren Randolph, and her job description included maid, handyman, waitress, bait slinger, and kayak wrangler. She worked from before sunrise to long after dark. She started running, letting her body heal and strengthen. She moved into the ratty little kayak shed with the outdoor toilet and shower after Mr. Randolph caught her sleeping in her car, and she’d finally managed to find the right balance of vitamin A and Skin So Soft bath oil to keep the mosquitoes from killing her.

  She thought that maybe she was happy.

  Since there were still a few fishermen renting units, Peg, the night bartender, had decided to work the bait counter this morning. Dani knew that, like Rolly in the kitchen, the tough woman made her own schedule, regardless of Mr. Randolph’s orders. That was about the only thing the two long-term employees had in common. Peg kept her bleached-to-death hair piled in a tattered knot on top of her head, revealing faded tattoos along her creased neck and bony shoulders. Her skin had the leathery look fair-skinned people got after decades in the too-hot sun. Even skin cancer wasn’t tough enough to take on Peg. Rolly, on the other hand, acted as if the sun would set him on fire, covering every inch of his dark, baby-smooth skin during all daylight hours.

  Dani slipped behind the counter as Peg brought a huge cleaver down onto a mess of baitfish.

  “You’re dripping.”

  Dani nodded. She’d rinsed off with the hose outside the bait shop; the water coming off her running clothes would just drain out with the fish muck. What didn’t make it to the drain would be forced along when Peg did her usual cleanup of the place. Mr. Randolph declared Jinky’s décor ‘hurricane chic,’ and Peg kept it up by cleaning both levels in the afternoons by turning the hose onto every surface regardless of whether a person occupied it. Tourists considered it a charming affectation. Dani knew Peg hoped they wouldn’t be fast enough to avoid the spray.

  Dani and Peg got along very well.

  With a quick check to be sure nobody could see her, Dani pulled her wet clothes off and pulled out the rubber tub of dry clothes she kept there. Underwear, bra, and whatever sat on top of the pile. Today it was a black golf shirtdress. That was good. The heat wave they’d been promised seemed to be delivering, but Dani always felt better with a little fabric between her and the Wheeler boys. She tossed her wet running clothes onto the porch behind the bait shop and headed back up to prep the bar for the few morning customers.

  Of course she’d had the option of not working at all for a while. She still had almost forty thousand dollars from her previous life squirreled away. Nobody knew about that money, she was certain. The people who had taken everything from her had a special fondness for cash. They weren’t likel
y to have let her keep it, so the less she relied on that money, the better. Unlike many people who fled to the Keys for a new life, Dani Britton didn’t want to drop off the map entirely. She couldn’t, not for a while at least. Dani needed to obtain legal, taxable employment, create a nice solid paper trail of nice solid citizenship because Dani knew she was still ‘a person of interest’ to more than one government agency.

  Did they think she didn’t know about the tracking device in her car, her much-beloved maroon Accord, now parked under the carport on the edge of the lot? Their opinion of her couldn’t be that low, especially since they had been so certain she’d been involved in the whole sick Rasmund mess.

  Dani plunged the knife into the first of a dozen oranges, stabbing harder than necessary to cut the fruit, not a fraction hard enough to vent her anger. Six years ago she had taken a job with what she thought was a private investigation firm only to find out it had been a front for an agency of the United States government. That same government claimed to know nothing of the agency’s existence when hired forces had descended upon them to wipe them out. Her friends had been murdered; she had been shot and nearly drowned. Nobody took the blame for the deaths; nobody took the blame for the crimes committed under that roof.

  After three months of painful surgery and recuperation, to say nothing of terrifying interrogation in a classified facility, Dani had stepped back into a world in which it seemed nobody had even noticed the atrocities committed in their backyard. Nobody paid any price at all except her and the dead.

  And Choo-Choo.

  Another orange, another savage slice, and Dani bit back the emotion she couldn’t identify. Anger? Fear? Regret? She didn’t know. Gorgeous, silly, funny Sinclair “Choo-Choo” Charbaneaux—she had left him in that place. He’d taken a bullet for her and she had left him in that place. She hadn’t had much of a choice—he probably had months of recovery ahead of him, his wounds much more severe than hers. Plus her choices had been made for her from the moment they pulled her from the icy water of the Tidal Basin. When they told her to sleep, she slept. When they told her to talk, she spit out every single word her mouth could manage. And when they were done with her, they had bundled her into a windowless van and dumped her outside her apartment with five thousand dollars cash and the keys to her car, and a very clear directive to never utter a word about the previous five years of her life.