“Drop you there?” Angel asked, ignoring Tucker. “Got a parachute?”
“No, but I’ve got something to do there.”
He laughed and emptied his beer. “Not running a taxi service, kid.”
“You told me you owed me one after that Ohio deal.”
Tucker leaned back from the conversation but Dani knew he still listened. She didn’t want to give too many details about Angel’s business but she didn’t want to miss this chance. Of all the places she’d seen the Charbaneauxs mentioned, Martha’s Vineyard was the most likely place to find Choo-Choo. He’d told her he’d probably wind up there. If she flew there commercially, she had no doubt her name would ping security. It would take forever to drive there, and even if she did, the tracker in her car would let whoever watched her know where she was headed. With a private jet, she could get in and get out with nobody knowing she was trying to reach her friend.
Dani put a lot of faith in her paranoia.
She also knew just how pissed the pilot had been when that kid from Ohio tried to rip him off. Angel Jackson was nobody to screw with. He stared at her with hard eyes as black as the braid that ran down his back, but she didn’t blink.
“You know it’s like seven hours each way. Gotta stop to refuel.”
“I can give you money for gas.”
He snickered. “That’s all been taken care of by my client. That’s not the point.”
“What is the point?”
He seemed to think about that. “It’s out of my way.”
“Not by much. I’ve looked at maps.”
“It’s an up-and-back. You’d only have about two hours; three, tops.”
“Okay.” She did some quick math. She’d be lucky to have until midnight to find her friend. Still, it was better than her odds of him strolling into the bar to find her. She saw the moment Angel relented, his shoulders settling.
“Okay then. I’ll take you on one condition. Tell me how you knew those bundles of cash were fake.”
Dani smiled. “The kid kept scratching his hand where the ink stains were. A lot of people are allergic to newspaper ink. Plus he had three rubber bands around his wrist.”
Angel stared at her. “You’re shitting me. You called out some dude based on rubber bands and an itchy hand?”
She kept smiling. Of course it had been more than that. Years of watching surveillance tapes of people engaging in corporate espionage, to say nothing of a childhood spent roaming the country with her trucker father, had given Dani an eye for tells. The Ohioan had all but hung a sign around his neck saying, “Don’t look at the money!” Still, Dani didn’t see any reason to spill all her secrets. A little mystery was a powerful thing.
It was getting her to Martha’s Vineyard.
She hopped off the bar to tell Mr. Randolph she’d be leaving. He said fine, so long as she was back to work his meeting in the morning. Plus she wanted to put sneakers on. It might sound dumb, but Dani didn’t want to find herself somewhere she didn’t know without at least having the ability to run with ease. She debated packing a weapon, maybe just the small shank she’d honed. It was Martha’s Vineyard after all, not Detroit. Still, DC had been a pretty civilized city and she sure wished she’d had a blade there. In a private plane there wouldn’t be any airport security, right?
A large hand on her arm jolted her from her thoughts. Tucker tilted his head at her, his eyes wide, his confusion showing in his smile.
“You’re leaving?”
“Oh. Yeah. I have to . . .” It occurred to her then that her habit of shuttling off thoughts when a more important one came along probably didn’t make her the most socially adept person. In one conversation she had completely dismissed Tucker from her thoughts. That probably wasn’t normal. Of course, it also wasn’t normal—her normal, at least—for anyone to question her comings and goings. Especially her goings. And especially guys who looked like Tucker.
“Let me guess.” He studied her with mock seriousness, those damn dimples drawing her in. “This isn’t the only place you’re indispensible. Bars everywhere call to you when lonely tourists can’t get their drinks.”
She nodded. “It’s kind of my superpower.”
“Are you coming back?”
The question felt serious and Dani surprised herself by blushing. “I hope so. But I’ve never flown with Angel before.”
He stared at her long enough that getting nervous became an option. Then he winked. “Good. Maybe I’ll still be here. If you’re lucky. Are you lucky, Dani?”
“No,” she said with a laugh. She pushed past him and called over her shoulder. “But I’m smart, and that’s better.”
Murfreesboro, TN
1:10pm, 82° F
“You see, it’s really just one chain that you loop back onto itself. You do that over and over with alternating rows, and before you know it, you have a peony!”
“Isn’t that clever?” Booker turned the fluffy pink bundle of yarn over in his fingers, examining the stitching. “And then, what? You sew it onto a hat or a scarf?”
Mrs. Beverly turned the flower over, showing him where the stitches came together. “It’s called appliqué, and you can put it on a hat or a scarf or even on baby blankets and afghans. My granddaughter made the most darling bed throw using different types of flowers appliquéd to a pale green throw. It looked just darling.”
“Oh, I don’t know if I’ll ever reach that level. I’m a rank beginner.” He crossed his legs, pulling the skein of yellow yarn closer to him. “That’s why I stopped by here today, hoping to pick up a few tips.”
Mrs. Beverly patted him with a veiny hand, her milky eye winking girlishly at him. “You’re doing just fine, Tom. Just fine. I think it’s just wonderful that you stopped in here with us today for our class.”
“Here” was the Linebaugh Public Library in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and the class was a free workshop called Hooks and Gabbers, a crochet class and discussion group, complete with sweet tea and wedding cookies.
Booker checked his stitches. He’d finally found the right shade of yellow he’d been looking for, the same yellow of a certain duvet cover he so vividly remembered snuggling up under all those months ago. An afghan wouldn’t be quite as good, but really, what would?
The crochet had been part of his physical therapy. What a surprise that had been—waking up chained to a bed, breathing tubes down his throat, his head screwed in place with a monstrous halo, his face numb and bandaged. They told him he’d been lucky. He hadn’t felt very lucky, but looking back he realized they were right.
When Dani had thrown herself over that railing into the blackness of the Tidal Basin—and how many of his dreams had featured that unbelievable sight?—she’d slammed his head down against the metal fence, shattering his cheekbone, nearly blinding him, and giving him a whopper of a concussion. The doctors told him that that damage is what saved his life, that going unconscious kept him from moving. If he had been leaning just another inch or two forward, his neck would have taken the weight of Dani’s fall. That damned pouch would have snapped his neck, if not ripped his head clean off. As it was, he suffered severe esophageal trauma, dislocated neck vertebrae, and he had to have the left side of his face reconstructed.
They’d done an amazing job.
Once the bandages came off and the swelling went down, Booker saw no signs of the incisions. They’d gone in through his nose, and he was happy to see his eyes looked the same, his mouth eventually moved the way it was supposed to, and the headaches came less and less frequently. The biggest problem had been pinched nerves and stiffness in his shoulders and arms. That’s where the crochet came in, to rebuild fine motor skills.
Well, that and to help him pass the psych evals.
He’d expected more interrogations. He knew he’d missed quite a bit of them, zonked out on the endless painkillers running through his bloodstream. He’d told them about the money, some of it at least, because as soon as they released him, he checked, and three of his five accounts had
been emptied. Figured. It always came back to money with these people.
He remembered coming up from one hazy dream world and telling the guard that the only presidents they really protected were the dead ones.
Booker chuckled and Mrs. Beverly smiled at him. “Did I say something funny?”
“Oh, just woolgathering.” He held up his fingers draped in yarn. “So to speak!”
The old woman’s laugh sounded just like a little bell, and Booker could feel her bony shoulder brush against his arm more than was absolutely necessary. The other women in the group snuck glances at him and threw looks to Mrs. Beverly that ranged from amused to covetous to downright scandalized. Let them stare, he thought. He liked the high color on the old woman’s mottled cheeks, the way she clasped her hands together in delight and rocked forward to catch his every word. If Booker’s friendly flirtation made her day, it did the same for him.
Plus she possessed extraordinary crochet skills.
He’d still been confined to bed, trying to learn to make daisy chains, when the inevitable meeting began. The woman in the navy blue suit, iron-jawed, shellacked hair, with two gravel-chewing thick-necks in tow. Mentions of dossiers and skill sets and threats disguised as promises. He’d known it was coming. They knew who he was and what he did and they wanted him to work for them.
He hated them for it.
Not enough to turn them down but he hated them for it.
So now he sat in the sunny public library flirting with Mrs. Beverly and learning to make those adorable yarn peonies, killing time after taking out an overweight building contractor this morning for no reason Booker cared to know.
“Are you making that afghan for anyone in particular?”
Booker smiled. He’d been drifting, ignoring Mrs. Beverly. He couldn’t have that. Spreading the growing yellow blanket out over his knees, he sighed. “This is for the most precious girl in the world. My little Dani.” Several women cooed at that. “I haven’t gotten to see her for a while, and I’d really like to have something special for her.”
Mrs. Beverly clucked. “Divorce is so difficult for families. The separation . . .”
He nodded, twisting the yarn into another chain stitch. “It is indeed but it’s my obligation to keep the relationship intact. It’s up to me to let my little Dani know that I’m thinking about her and there is nothing in this world that’s going to keep me from seeing her again.”
Mrs. Beverly refreshed his tea.
Martha’s Vineyard, MA
9:50pm, 72° F
Dani didn’t know an island could have so many trees. Not palm trees, either. From the plane they had looked like regular pine trees but down on the ground, she saw that many of them grew twisted and gnarled, their scabby trunks jutting out at odd angles. Maybe it was because the sun had already set, throwing weird shadows through the forests, but Dani’s initial impression of Martha’s Vineyard was a creepy one.
The Google search had mentioned a Charbaneaux on Martha’s Vineyard—Maisey Charbaneaux-Fulks, helping organize something called MenemShenanigans. Jackson told her that Menemsha was a town on the island. Dani didn’t care why these shenanigans would be taking place in a different town, called Chilmark. She didn’t care about Maisey Charbaneaux-Fulks or the money they were raising for an art colony on an island that looked like it contained more than its share of the world’s wealth. What she cared about was finding Choo-Choo, seeing him for herself, making sure he was okay.
The last time she’d talked with him, she’d been afraid he would kill himself.
After Rasmund, Dani hadn’t lost everything. She had the freedom to reinvent herself. She had no close family, nobody expecting anything from her. Choo-Choo had been ordered to be the Prodigal Son, returning repentant to his disapproving family. The look on his face when he’d told her their plan to cover up the true story of the Rasmund incident still haunted Dani. So she’d just flown a thousand miles up the East Coast to an island she knew nothing about to crash a party she wasn’t invited to in order to find a woman somehow related to Choo-Choo to ask if he was okay.
If the Feds had a problem with that, they could go fuck themselves.
Jackson had been right about getting around the island. Even at night, she’d been able to hitch a ride in no time. A golden-tanned family with a matching Golden Lab didn’t hesitate to let her climb into their Jeep. They’d heard about the party she mentioned, and Dani could hear a distant twinge of disappointment that they hadn’t been invited and didn’t know exactly where it was. Instead they dropped her at a little market that looked like it had been airlifted from the Deep South circa 1950, charmingly rustic with bins of fruits and vegetables on the porch, and several old bikes with woven baskets leaning unlocked against the railing.
The illusion took a hit when Dani saw the shelves stocked with fourteen dollar jars of English lemon curd, exotic tapenades, and wines she couldn’t pronounce. She ventured to the high wooden counter in the back and found a straight-backed old woman with enough New England crust to be an extra on Murder, She Wrote.
“Of course there are Charbaneauxs on the Vineyard. Always have been. If you want to find them tonight you’ve come to the right place. That way.” She pointed to her left.
“Could you be a little less specific?” Dani deadpanned.
“I could, but that wouldn’t be very neighborly. Keep walking that way. You’ll hear the music. It’s a wonderful celebration.” Her smile could have been sarcastic, or maybe the mirth had been worn away by the years. “Too bad you’re here at the end of it.”
“I’ll make a note for next year.”
Dani’s mood soured as she hiked the narrow roads winding through the darkness in the general direction the old woman had pointed. The houses, if they could be called that, got larger and farther off the road the longer she walked, but she could hear music rolling toward her so she figured she had to be close. Of course close didn’t really count when none of the roads she ventured onto led to anything but more roads and fewer houses, the last of the sunlight vanishing behind the scrubby pines.
She berated herself for the stupidity of this plan. She was going to wind up lost on a tiny island. When something rustled in the shadows of the biggest rhododendron bushes she had ever seen, she started berating herself for not checking to see if Martha’s Vineyard had any wolves or wildcats protected in its well-preserved bosom. She had just decided to turn around and try to find her way back to the little market when a Range Rover roared around the bend, illuminating the road ahead—a road lined as far as the eye could see with matching Range Rovers. That was a very good sign.
By the time Dani made it up the winding drive she was glad she’d taken up running. Despite what she’d seen on the map, this didn’t feel like a small island. The house—again, an understatement—sprawled across a wide, sloping expanse, porches layered three and four levels deep toward what smelled like water in the distance. Lanterns hung everywhere, casting warm shadows over a crowd that danced and drank and laughed. African drum music kept bodies swaying around waiters laden with trays of something that smelled delicious.
Dani had chosen to live in Florida because she thought it was as far from her Oklahoma childhood lifestyle as she could get. She had been wrong. This house, this island, felt like another planet to her.
Planet Choo-Choo.
She didn’t spy anyone as beautiful as her friend, but as a whole, the crowd possessed that same long-limbed elegance, that ownership of the air around them that had always set Choo-Choo apart from the simply fine-looking. This wasn’t the sleek fashion and glittering jewelry of Miami; the colors were muted, the fabrics stylishly rumpled, and the accessories the women sported seemed more like hardware than fine jewelry.
But the people were gracious. They smiled when she said Charbaneaux; they hid most of their surprise when she asked about Choo-Choo. Everyone seemed to know him, or of him, and a few thought they’d seen him at the party. They shared meaningful glances when they thought she w
asn’t looking. Passing deeper into the party, through a colossal patio room to yet another array of porches full of lanterns and food and partygoers, Dani sensed she was getting close. The reactions to Choo-Choo’s name became more guarded, the eyebrows arched higher, and more than one person let their gaze drift to a section of porch screened behind a trellis of grapes.
She headed into the shadows of the trellis, the music growing fainter behind her, the crowd thinning out to nothing. The only light on this corner of the house came from a red Moroccan lantern hanging off the eave. It took a moment to make out the shape in the darkness.
Choo-Choo sprawled in a deep Adirondack chair. His blond hair caught the red glow and the sliver of his profile was expressionless.
Dani had seen a man sitting like this before, sprawled in a chair, face expressionless. That had been at Rasmund. He had been shot in the head. That’s when her world had fallen apart.
It couldn’t be happening again.
No, something moved. She thought he had shifted but as she regained her nerve and stepped closer, she saw that Choo-Choo wasn’t alone. Someone kneeled between his thighs, a blond French braid visible as it rose and fell in a steady rhythm.
Oh.
She must have said that out loud because Choo-Choo turned his head, finding her in the shadows. His expression didn’t change.
“What are you doing here?”
Dani didn’t know where to look as the blond girl between his legs lifted her head and wiped her lips. “What do you think I’m doing?” the girl asked, annoyed. “How much have you had to drink tonight?”
“I’m not talking to you.” He nudged her with his knee and ignored her grunt of protest, staring at Dani. “What are you doing here?”
“I’ve been looking for you,” Dani managed to say. The girl spun at the sound of her voice.
“Get out of here,” he said.
“What?” Dani and the girl spoke in unison.
“Not you,” Choo-Choo said to Dani and then nudged the girl again. “Get out of here.” He sat straighter in the chair and the girl tumbled backwards. He ignored the long string of profanity that poured out of her mouth, an unrelated string of fuck and prick and shithead jumbled together and trailing behind her as she ran back toward the party. Dani tried not to look too closely as he tucked himself back into his loose linen pants.
Redemption Key (A Dani Britton Thriller) Page 6
