So now she made mojitos and cleaned toilets and sold baitfish. And she paid taxes. Mr. Randolph had been surprised by that last part, but she knew she’d made the right decision. She had a roof over her head, warm water to swim in. She ran and nobody chased her. Most importantly, she had a legal, traceable stream of income to report obediently to the Internal Revenue Service, letting the powers that be know she was holding up her end of the devil’s bargain they’d offered her.
6:48am, 83° F
Oren unlocked the cash register and flipped on the ceiling fans. He didn’t bother with the overhead lights. It was already hot, and anyone headed to Jinky’s at this hour didn’t need lights to find their way. They could hear Rolly humming to himself in the kitchen as he prepped for breakfast.
“Is Peg going to cover the bar for you during the meeting?” Oren asked. “You know how Joaquin likes you to serve him his drinks.”
Dani rolled her eyes and nodded. Oren laughed.
He had taken over Jinky’s from his former coke dealer when the man had decided to flee the country. Along with all the fixtures, the booze, and the debt, he’d inherited Jinky’s former girlfriend Peg as a waitress and Rolly, the short-order cook. That was seventeen years ago, and both Peg and Rolly had stayed on, keeping their own hours, setting their own pay. Oren didn’t mind. Finding good help in the transient population of the islands wasn’t easy. Besides, he was scared of Peg, and even after all these years he wasn’t sure what Rolly’s real name was or even where he lived. Sometimes life in the Keys was like that.
Dani fit in like she was born to it. First of all, the regulars were so used to the disdain of Peg, the younger woman seemed like a ray of sunshine in comparison. At least she didn’t throw the drinks onto the table. And while it had been more than a decade and a half since coke accounted for the majority of the bar’s profits, the clientele hadn’t become overly reputable. Jinky’s maintained its aura of slightly shady, slightly rough local watering hole, frequented by the type of drinkers who like their bartenders on the less engaging side.
There were always exceptions, especially during high season. More than half of the season visitors were yearly regulars—fishermen and snorkelers, stoners and hippies, who liked to get away from the commercialism of the other Keys. What they didn’t realize was that their presence created the very commercialism they were trying to escape, but the locals accepted them—and their money—with a fair amount of equilibrium. Two-thirds of Oren’s rooms had been booked from February through June, and the season had been lucrative.
“Don’t forget,” Dani said, rinsing off a bowl of lemons, “the Texans are checking out of Five today.”
“Any chance they’ll take the Australians with them?” A group of Australians in Room Six had broken the two windows and the air-conditioner, and backed up the toilet at least every other week since taking the place at the end of June. “You might as well close off the rest of the cottages after the Texans go. We probably won’t need any rooms but the four in the unit across the way, and even those’ll be mostly for meetings.” Except for an isolated weekend here or there, Jinky’s rental units would be at a near standstill, tourist-wise, until November.
Oren had foolishly thought he could cut Dani from the payroll at the end of the season. He’d even told Peg that, only to face her braying laugh. She’d known all along that he’d never have the heart to throw the strange, quiet girl out. More than once Oren wondered who was actually running this joint.
Dani had proven herself valuable in more ways than one. For one thing, she seemed impossible to gross out. Fish heads and backed-up toilets, dead rats and vomiting kids, nothing made her flinch. Plus she could rig up fixes for the endless list of breakdowns in the old camp. Windows, air-conditioners, even the listing kayak dock—she’d pick through the old toolboxes and rescue bits of metal and wood from the debris pile hidden behind the clump of sea grape at the water’s edge and cobble together a workable and inexpensive solution.
She didn’t take up any room. When he’d found her sleeping in her car, he’d told her to fix up the kayak shack until she could make other arrangements. Since she had access to the master key for the units, Oren had assumed she would make herself at home in one of the cottages, sneaking her linens in and out with the renters’. But no, she’d repaired a crappy old cot, wired in some screens, and scrubbed out an old beer fridge. She’d asked permission to use rental sheets, to park her car under the carport, even to hang that rope from the upper deck of Jinky’s. Why she’d wanted to keep her clothes in a rubber tub in the bait shop was beyond him, but if it didn’t bother Peg, why fight it?
But where she really sealed her place at Jinky’s was at his meetings. He’d been glad to have her serve drinks at his meetings rather than Peg. Dani was small and unthreatening, cute but not overly so. She kept her eyes down and her mouth shut and moved so quietly and efficiently, people often forgot she was there.
If they only knew.
The first meeting she’d served had been between Angel Jackson and some Ohio gangster wannabe who wanted the black-eyed pilot to help him move some weed through the Keys. Oren had sat back, letting the two men hash out the details, until Dani had asked him to step outside with her. She’d told him the Ohioan was lying, and his money was fake. She’d been so blunt and dispassionate about it, so confident, that Oren had gone right in, upended the dealer’s bag and discovered that all but the top layer of cash bundles were cut newspaper wrapped in hundred-dollar bills.
He’d let Angel handle the rest.
Oren didn’t ask how Dani had known, and she hadn’t offered. But he’d had her serve every meeting since, even ones with the Wheelers.
On the neighboring Keys, even as far up as Miami, Oren Randolph was known as “that guy.” When someone needed a set of fake IDs good enough to get through customs, they called Oren. If they needed a connection to certain groups of influence, they called Oren. Technically, Oren bought and sold nothing but drinks and seafood, but he was the guy who knew the guy who sold the things, legal and not, that people needed. And he had a reputation for discretion as well as connections to smooth over the more questionable transactions on many levels. Oren thought of himself as a resource manager, an information broker.
The Wheeler boys were an unfortunate third-generation inheritance that came with Jinky’s. Juan and Joaquin Wheeler probably weren’t brothers in anything other than their full-fledged psychosis. Their major business consisted of smuggling and bloodshed from Miami to Key West. They had overthrown the previous psychopath who had controlled the heroin traffic, said psychopath being the man who had so unnerved Jinky as to cause the coke dealer to run for his life to points unknown. Before that unlikely event, Oren Randolph had considered Jinky to be the most dangerously deranged human he had ever known.
Seventeen years and many, many horrific tales later Oren’s horizons had broadened.
As always, Dani seemed to read his mind. “Looking forward to another chance to get chummy with Juan Wheeler?”
Oren shook his head. “Trust me. Nobody does business with the Wheelers by choice. Luckily for me, they seem to hold me in something of a favored, protected light—some Wheeler combination of elder worship and historic preservation.” He slammed the register shut. “I don’t care if they put me on an endangered species list; they haven’t killed me or anyone dear to me.”
“Yet.”
“Yet. But hey”—he nudged her and gave her a wink—“I think Joaquin has got his eye on you. His good one, that is.”
Dani laughed. Oren liked the sound of it. Quiet little stone-faced Dani handled the clumsy passes and drool—yes, actual drool—with finesse. Joaquin still ogled, she still served him, and all of them kept breathing.
For now.
That the Wheelers had come to him needing a connection had been bad enough; when they told him with pride that they were orchestrating a deal for Simon Vincente, a known butcher, arms dealer, and all around tornado of evil throughout the entire state
of Florida, he’d almost balked. Almost. But everyone knew that anyone saying no to Vincente usually got as far as “Nuh” before losing at least one favored body part.
The only upside in the dismal deal was that Vincente and the Wheelers knew exactly who they were looking for, just not how to find him. That’s why they came to Oren, trusting that his contacts ran deep. So he’d called around and found their man—a Canadian gangster named Bermingham. Oren learned the man was a butcher in his own right who had ways to grease the wheels of Canadian customs, and a habit of creating scenes that needed bleach to clean up.
Terrific.
He didn’t know who was selling what to whom, and he wanted to keep it that way. But Bermingham had insisted the meeting take place before ten in the morning, and Juan Wheeler always liked to be an hour or two early for meetings. That didn’t give Oren much time to contact the FBI.
7:15am, 84° F
Oren fished his phone from his pocket and dialed Caldwell’s number from memory. As usual, he heard the sound of feminine giggling before the agent spoke.
“This had better be important.” Caldwell’s voice sounded thick with sleep.
“If you had called me back last night, you’d have known that the Wheelers are coming in today.”
He heard something slapping flesh and a high-pitched squeal. “I was busy last night.”
“Well we’re all going to be busy today. Let’s talk.”
“Where are you?”
“Where do you think I am?” Oren climbed onto his usual barstool. “I’d wager I’m a hell of a lot closer to my office than you are to yours.”
“That goes without saying.” Caldwell groaned into the phone. “Give me twenty minutes. And I’m putting my drinks on your tab.”
“That goes without saying too, doesn’t it?”
“Not too early for a mojito, is it?”
“Is it ever?”
7:40am, 86° F
Caldwell sat where he always sat, next to Oren’s stool at the short end of the bar. Strictly speaking, that section of the bar was service only, but since Rolly tossed most of the food through the window and Peg had never been overly committed to the service aspect of the job, Caldwell had claimed that section as his own private perch. Caldwell’s receding hairline shone with sweat and his pink guayabera shirt brought out the sea of freckles that covered every inch of his exposed skin. He was in the middle of telling Peg a story that made the normally cross woman pitch her head back and howl. Oren could only imagine how filthy the punch line had to be to elicit that reaction.
“Well take your time, son!” Caldwell took his drink from Oren. “It’s not like I have all day to sit here and get hit on by your staff.”
“You wish,” Peg said, slapping a bowl of peanuts down before the agent.
“You know I do, Peg. You know I do. Anytime you want to take me up on it . . .” He lunged across the bar, swinging and missing a chance to swat Peg’s behind as she turned away from him, still laughing. Caldwell was the only person in all of Florida Oren had met who could get the hard woman to laugh like that.
Special Agent Daniel Caldwell worked out of the Miami FBI office but spent most of his times cruising the Keys. He claimed it was his territory, but Oren knew Caldwell spent more time investigating the evolution of the mojito than he did the influx of drugs and guns across state lines. Not that he was crooked exactly, any more than Oren himself. As the agent liked to say, he had a broad understanding of the nature of business. He’d come through more than once for Oren over the years, distracting local law enforcement when Oren struggled to get his coke use under control, and Oren had repaid the favor many times over. Caldwell had a weakness for wealthy women and volatile girls—a lethal combination—and had needed a place to hide more than once.
Caldwell always wanted to be kept distantly informed about the Wheelers. He wouldn’t meddle, Oren knew. He wouldn’t stage a bust at Jinky’s or bring any hint of law enforcement into Oren’s sphere of influence. He also let Oren know right away if any of his clients were misrepresenting themselves—men who claimed to be boat collectors who were actually mob enforcers; alleged diamond dealers moving large quantities of heroin. The exchange of information benefitted both Caldwell and Oren, keeping them both in good standing in their respective fields. Plus, Oren liked the crabby little agent. He was a hell of a fisherman.
Oren had told himself he was going to stick to orange juice this morning, but the combination of the Wheelers’ impending arrival and the sound of Caldwell sighing over his mojito made him change his mind. Peg had taken her bucket of ice back down to the bait shop so Oren called to Dani, who stood at the far end of the bar prepping fruit, as she always did in the morning. It was just too hot to get up again. “Dani? How about a vodka?”
She scraped the limes into the bin and wiped her hands on her towel. “Sure thing, boss.” She knew how he liked his drink—lots of ice, one lime wedge squeezed to death—and slid it before him in no time. Oren watched her small, tan hands settle on the bar, just a fraction of a second of a delay that seemed to him an act of composure, before she raised her gaze to Caldwell and scared the hell out of Oren.
She smiled. It wasn’t a big smile; it wasn’t shark-like. She didn’t leer, and her eyes didn’t glare coldly above her bare teeth. It was just the smile of a girl working a bar for tips, but it looked sort of wrong on Dani’s face.
“How’s your drink, sir? Can I get you anything?”
Caldwell turned to Oren in comic shock. “Sir? I know it’s been a while since I’ve been in, but has it been that long? Have you instituted new house rules?”
Oren dismissed his anxiety. “You haven’t met my new wonder girl? Dani Britton, I’d like to introduce you to a man you must never let touch you. Daniel Caldwell or, as Peg calls him, Uncle Bad Touch.”
Caldwell bowed at the introduction and flashed Dani his signature lady-killer smile. “Don’t believe a word of it, sweetheart. I’m a scholar and a gentleman. Hey, we’re Dan and Dani. We could start a dance team.” He winked at her. “What do you say?”
Dani kept that strange smile in place but said nothing. Oren thought her eyes looked a lot like they did when she was climbing the rope. Caldwell continued, unfazed.
“So where are you from, Dani?”
Her lips whitened around the edges and Oren spoke up. “Oklahoma. Dani started out doing housekeeping and when Hesson got arrested, she stepped up and never looked back. She makes a mean mojito, you’ll be happy to hear. Better than mine.”
“You’re keeping her hidden from me? You lecherous bastard. I do like my mojitos.” Caldwell beamed at Dani, who hadn’t moved an inch. “And if I may say so, you are a vast improvement over Hesson in the looks department. Let’s hope you’re a little less larcenous too. Or at least a better judge of targets.”
“Poor Hesson.” Oren lifted his glass in salute. “Never did have a lick of sense.”
Dani watched them drink, her hands still folded on the bar. “If there’s nothing else, Mr. Randolph, I’m going to finish prepping the bar; then I’ll set up the room.”
“Thank you, Dani.” Oren watched her over his drink as she moved down the bar.
Caldwell watched her too, his focus on her ass. He arched an eyebrow. “Something you’d like to tell me? Like, are you hitting that? Because I have to say, making your piece call you sir takes some balls.”
“Do you practice being a pig, or does it just come naturally?”
He ignored the barb to watch Dani. “She’s a little thing, isn’t she? What’s her story?”
Oren shrugged. “She’s not much of a talker. She can run like hell, I’ll tell you that. She runs the island every single day. Good worker, too. Keeps her mouth shut. Does her job.” He opted not to mention her helpfulness during his meetings.
“What do you think?” The agent crunched an ice cube in his open mouth. “Bad breakup? I’ve seen her around the property. She doesn’t seem inclined to make new friends. She’s ducked me a couple tim
es. She ever pick anyone up?”
“Jealous?” Something in Caldwell’s tone made Oren want to change the subject.
“You said she runs. Maybe she’s been running a long time. You think Dani Britton is her real name?”
“If it’s not, it’s a hell of a cover. She’s legal, paid aboveboard. She insisted on it.” Under-the-table employment shocked nobody in this part of the country, not even a federal agent.
“Insisted, huh?” Another ice cube shattered in his mouth. “Why would she do that?”
“Because it’s required by law? And she’s a good citizen?” Oren sipped his vodka. “Look, I’ve got Rolly in the kitchen who has been shot no less than three times, at least once by Peg, who scares the hell out of everyone from here to Miami, including the alligators. I’m pleased as punch to finally have a legitimate employee on the payroll, one with half a brain.”
Caldwell’s voice took on a low and serious tone. “I’m not saying she’s bad news. I’m just saying you should know a little more about her.”
“What? I’ve got the Wheelers coming in and she makes you suspicious? It’s not like she moved in with a drug-sniffing dog. She’s a five-foot-nothing girl who keeps her mouth shut and does her job.”
“Then there’s no harm in running a background check.”
Oren emptied his glass. “I think the reason you don’t like her is because she doesn’t like you. She’s impervious to your devious charms.”
Redemption Key (A Dani Britton Thriller) Page 2
