Instead she said, “Hi, Tom.”
And there was that smile. She stepped closer, thoughts of a mongoose and a cobra flickering somewhere in her head, although she couldn’t remember which one hunted which. She stepped closer and could see her memory had been correct. His eyes were still the blue she remembered, still strangely beautiful.
In one step she calculated how quickly he could reach her and snap her neck and how hard she would have to swing the bucket to smash his face and how sorry she was that the bucket was plastic and not metal and how useless it would probably be and how strange it was the men she found attractive.
She thought how far the universe had gone to prove to her that she could never get away.
It kind of seemed like overkill.
She got it. There wasn’t a safe place on this planet.
2:00pm, 104° F
Oren slid the screen door closed behind him and dropped into the chaise lounge on his porch. His house looked out over the open water, the inlet to the right on the other side of the thick hedge of sea grape. At night, if he tilted his head just right he could hear soft music coming from the deck of the bar on the other side of the hedge. If trouble broke out, he’d be able to hear it without tilting his head. That was as far as Oren went with security systems.
Not that they would have helped him today.
After tomorrow, Jinky’s was going to hell. He knew that with the certainty of a man whose drug habit had kept him circling the pit for too many years. There was only so long a man could bump shoulders with darkness before stepping all the way through. He should have put his foot down with the Wheelers years ago. He should have faced them down before they’d taken over the local underworld the way they had. They hadn’t always been as dangerous as they were now. Sure, they’d always been batshit crazy and armed to the teeth, but by avoiding the ugliness, he’d let them gain inches that turned into miles that turned into a road that ran smack-dab into the middle of his life.
And Bermingham had found that road and ridden right in on it.
That was the problem with predators. There was always another bigger, scarier, more persistent predator right behind them. And people like Oren were just side dishes to the main meal.
When he heard careful footsteps crunching the gravel beside the house, Oren fully expected to see Bermingham or his thug emerge from the shadows, gun in hand, to end his life. As a testimony to his train of thought—and to the vodka—the thought didn’t make him panic. It just made him tired.
Caldwell crept onto the porch, pulling the screen door closed silently. When Oren sat up, the agent put his finger to his lips and tipped his head in the direction of Oren’s living room. Oren followed his friend inside, sliding the inside door shut, not saying a word as Caldwell moved to the stereo system on the far wall. In seconds, guitar music flooded the room, louder than Oren usually played it.
Caldwell stepped very close and grabbed his arm. Oren kept his voice just above a whisper. “I never thought I’d say this, buddy, but I sure hope you’re getting ready to kiss me.”
“I wish,” the agent hissed. “But I think it’s likely we’re both getting ready to get fucked. Have you noticed anything rearranged in here? Anyone on the premises that shouldn’t be?”
“You’re kidding, right? Nobody’s had a key to this door since Carter was in the White House. As for the bar, half the regulars there probably have warrants out. What is this?”
Caldwell sighed. “I just had a very unpleasant phone call from my superior after I ran a check on your girl.”
“You already ran a check on Dani.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I ran it on Dani and got nothing. I ran it together with her friend, blondie. Turns out Choo-Choo is a Charbaneaux, something of a society celebrity, and running a check on any Charbaneaux is bad news; running it together with one Danielle Britton gets my dick slammed in a drawer. Come on; let’s get away from the window.
Oren followed him to the little breakfast bar that marked off the kitchen. Caldwell knew his way around as well as Oren and pulled the vodka from the freezer. Neither bothered with ice.
2:00pm, 104° F
Booker didn’t think he’d be able to speak. He rarely felt the air temperature around him, was only aware of it in a passing way, so the heat he felt moving through his muscles unsettled him. This wasn’t how he had expected to feel. It certainly wasn’t how he had expected Dani to react.
He’d expected rage, fear, tears. Staring into her soft brown eyes, though, Booker realized how stupid that expectation was. This was Dani Britton. She always surprised him.
How cute she looked. More than cute. He’d known she was tiny; he’d been in her closet, seen her little shoes. But he’d met her in November when she’d been bundled up in layers upon layers of woolly shirts. She didn’t wear those layers now.
She didn’t wear much at all.
He wanted to let his eyes roam over the tan expanse of her little arms. He wouldn’t have imagined her to be so toned. Or so dark. Of course they had met in November, winter, miles from the equator, months ago. It felt like only days had passed.
She was still his Dani. She still met his gaze with that calm, easy stare. She wasn’t hiding behind bundles of clothes and bags now. She wasn’t hiding at all, and as much as he wanted to let his eyes take in the smooth shoulders and to follow the seam of the little dress where it headed south, he didn’t want it to be like that. He didn’t want to ogle her.
“Hi, Tom.”
Another shiver rushed beneath his skin. Her voice. He thought he remembered everything about Dani Britton; he’d replayed their phone calls over and over in his head. He remembered the unhidden fear in her voice, the way she’d listened to him and talked to him—really talked to him. He thought he remembered everything, but nothing prepared him for the sound of her voice again, face-to-face.
“Did you come to kill me?”
He laughed out loud. That was his Dani, getting right to the point.
“I don’t think so.” It was a strange way to answer. It just popped out. “I’ve never been to Florida before. I was surprised to find out you were here. It’s a long way from Oklahoma. And DC.”
“Not far enough, apparently.”
She said it with a little smile and Booker felt another rush of heat.
“I’ve been thinking about you.”
Then she laughed. “I’ve been thinking about you too.”
Booker wasn’t so far out of the stream of human interaction that he didn’t catch the edge in her tone. Was this a mistake? Should he have kept his presence a secret, watched Dani in private for a while? This wasn’t like him. He didn’t stammer and blush like a schoolboy.
But then, he didn’t get to meet girls like Dani.
Except when he was hired to kill them, and that was a different story.
Dani sighed and swung the bucket she carried into the deep bar sink. When she reached forward to turn on the faucet, he saw the starburst of scars across her shoulder. He didn’t think. Before he knew it he stood on the rungs of the stool, stretching long across the bar to put his fingertips on the jagged white lines. When his fingertips touched her warm skin, he felt her jump, her muscles twitching along her back.
2:08pm, 104° F
It was only the crack of a metal bolt against her knee that shocked Dani enough to keep her from leaping onto the counter. She wouldn’t have screamed. She couldn’t have. Her throat had closed to the point of suffocating her.
Some part of her, some insane part of her mind that had had enough of the adrenaline and the suspense, had made her turn her back on Tom. It had wanted him to touch her, had wanted him to lunge and do whatever it was he planned on doing. It was the same part that wanted Bermingham’s shipment to show up, wanted dawn to get here and to find out once again if she was going to get shot or strangled or have to run for her life.
“What happened?” His voice was reverent as his fingertips traced the knotty scars.
She didn’t t
urn around. She didn’t think about what his fingers felt like.
“What do you think happened? Don’t you remember?”
“I remember you going over. I hit my head pretty hard.”
At that she turned, stepping close to the bar, following him as he dropped back on the stool. “You hit your head pretty hard?” She spit out the words as she climbed on a shelf, lifting herself so she bent over the bar into his face. “Let me see.”
He didn’t back away from her, but his eyes widened. “What?”
“Let me see where you hit your head. Let me see the scars.”
“There are no scars.” He ran his fingers over his cheekbone and around his eye. “This was all rebuilt. They did it from the inside so there wouldn’t be any scars.”
She was close enough to bite him. “Well that was awfully nice of them.”
Could he see how much she wanted to bite him? To give him a scar? Was he afraid of her? This time he didn’t have a knife; she didn’t have a bullet wound in her leg. This was her territory and she felt stronger than she’d ever felt in her life. Did he see that? Is that why he seemed to tremble when she moved closer to him?
Or was it something else?
Something wet and cold bounced off the back of her neck and Dani spun around back onto the ground. Down by the kitchen Peg made a show of drying her hands on her shorts, flickering her glance up toward the deck door. Dani looked that way too in time to see the enormous figure of Bermingham walking hard and fast across the floor.
He didn’t even pretend to greet her. Instead he stood right at the corner of the bar, staring squarely at Tom. He leaned forward, thick forearms sprawled on the bar, long fingers nearly reaching Tom’s drink, staring into Tom’s profile.
“Everything okay here?”
“Everything’s fine,” Dani said. “There’s—”
He shot out a finger and wagged it in her face. “I’m not talking to you.” Dani flinched. Bermingham hadn’t looked to see how close his hand had come. Tom had seen it. He watched it as Bermingham brought it to point at him. “I’m talking to you, friend.”
All that nervousness or whatever she had seen in Tom’s body language disappeared under a subtle settling of his shoulders. The change came on so smoothly she almost laughed. Talking with her made him nervous. Being cornered by a man the size of Bermingham put him at ease. There was absolutely no upside to this situation.
Unless they killed each other.
Dani stepped back against the bar sink and folded her arms.
“I noticed the way you decided to reach across the bar to touch my girl. I noticed she didn’t like it much. I wonder if you’d mind not doing that again.”
Tom said nothing, just looked over at Dani with a little smile Bermingham couldn’t miss.
“Oh. Oh. Unless . . .” The Canadian had turned back to her. He stood straight, his huge hands gripping the edge of the bar. “Is this another friend? You’ve got a lot of friends, Dani.”
She didn’t look at Tom. “He’s no friend of mine.”
“I’m a paying customer,” Tom said.
Tom drummed his fingers on the bar before turning to smile up at the Canadian. Tom wasn’t a big man. Though sinewy, he looked downright slight next to the gangster. Bermingham had at least six or seven inches on him. He had a bad temper and a worse reputation, but Dani knew—and not from hearsay—what Tom was capable of. Seeing him move so slowly, that little smile on his full lips, brought her nightmares to life in full color.
Bermingham didn’t see it. He turned to Dani. “You all right? You want me to stick around? Get rid of this guy?”
Now there was a question.
Tom wiped his fingers on his drink napkin and slid from the stool. Bermingham leaned on an elbow and watched him.
“I assure you,” Tom said, “there’s no need to get territorial. If you’ll just point me to the restrooms, I’ll freshen up and then settle my bill.” Bermingham pointed and Tom walked off, smiling.
“You okay?” he asked her once the men’s room door had closed. “This really isn’t the time to be making new friends, Dani. I don’t like strangers around during a deal. Understand?”
She didn’t answer him. She didn’t hear him. All she could focus on was the wrinkled bar napkin Tom had dropped, and the metal Jinky’s key beneath it.
2:18pm, 105° F
Caldwell finished his drink in one pull and poured another.
Oren found it difficult to swallow. “Are you going to tell me what’s up?”
“I think I’m being set up. And I think they’re using you to do it.”
“Who?”
“The Bureau.”
Oren forced down his vodka. “You’re being set up by the FBI? For what?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.” He rolled the glass across his palm, staring at the vodka. “This is all too tidy. Bermingham, whatever the hell the Wheelers are moving that brought him all the way down from Canada, your girl showing up and getting cozy. I know you think I’m being paranoid about her connection to Bermingham, but—”
Oren cleared his throat. “I’m not so sure you are paranoid. They know each other. Dani says it just happened, that she didn’t know who he was. She’s pretty convincing. But if you have something that says otherwise, I’d like to hear it.”
“Shit.” Caldwell fumbled his drink, his fingers trembling. “Shit.”
“You’re going to have to do a little better than that, man. What did you find out?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. I ran Dani’s name and got squat. I ran the kid’s name. Got nothing but society gossip. You know what else I got?” He poured again. “I got a visit. From my SAC. Not a phone call. Not from my SSA. My SAC paid me a visit in person.”
“Am I supposed to know what that means?”
“It means God himself stepped down from heaven to check my emails. Special Agent in Charge Tomblin Richter doesn’t make office calls. He’s my boss’s boss’s boss. He’s the Jesus of Miami. He tells the hurricanes when they can roll in. Do you hear me? He ‘stopped by’ my office for a little chat. With me.”
“What did he say?”
“He asked what my interest was in Danielle Britton.”
The look on the agent’s face made that sentence far scarier than Oren thought it should be. “And what did you say?”
“I lied out my ass. Said someone had recommended I talk with her about a case I’m on. I had to stand there pretending this was situation normal as he asked me if I’d found anything and then told me it was probably for the best that I hadn’t.”
Considering the fact that he had a six-foot-five mountain of dangerous Canadian less than two hundred feet away in his units, Oren found it difficult to see the danger in Caldwell’s interoffice crisis. It must have shown on his face because Caldwell started explaining.
“Look, if I step out of line, my SSA will call me in, the Supervisory Special Agent. It happens all the time. She’s my boss. If it gets serious, like the time I had to explain about Bancroft and all those diamonds—you remember that?—I get called down by the ASAC, the Assistant Special Agent in Charge. That’s bad. That got me suspended, remember?”
“Yeah, of course I do. You drank a month’s worth of profit that week.”
“Yeah, being dressed down by the ASAC is not a good time.”
“And so,” Oren struggled to follow, “being called by the SAC, not his assistant, means you’re in bigger trouble? For looking up a file that has nothing on it?”
Caldwell rubbed his eyes. “You’re missing the point of all this. It’s not just a matter of who dressed me down, it’s why. If Dani has no file with us, if there’s nothing to report, how did they know I was looking for her? Why does the highest-ranking agent in Miami care that I looked into a woman who has absolutely nothing on file?”
Oren couldn’t think of a good way this could go. “Because . . .”
The agent nodded. “Because she has a file. And whatever is on it is important enough
and dangerous enough to restrict it. And whoever is restricting it is powerful enough to have the top man in my division find me and tell me to drop it. Whoever they are, they can make my SAC their errand boy. Now you’ve got a girl in your bar who has that kind of juice in her past and she’s on hand when one of the most wanted men in North America just happens to be doing a deal so big that the fucking Wheelers are squealing? You tell me that my bosses haven’t put two and two together and come up with a big fat implication for you? And if you’re implicated and I’m sitting on my ass at your bar not blowing the whistle, I’m implicated. You see what I’m saying?”
“Oh shit. I suddenly feel a strong urge to sail to Cuba.”
“Yeah, well, if the Wheelers have decided to step up their game and move into weapons, especially weapons that could be used in domestic terrorism, you and I might be going to Cuba sooner than you think. We might get to be bunkmates at Gitmo.”
“Tell me you’re working on worst-case scenarios there.”
“Can you think of a reason not to?” Caldwell leaned back against the counter. He looked exhausted. “I might be totally wrong. I may have this all wrong from the get-go, but you’ve got to admit there is something rotten here. Something is not adding up. There are too many strangers without enough information. No matter how I look at it, no matter who comes into play, all eyes seem to keep turning back to your girl and I want to know why.”
“Can’t you go to your superiors and tell them about the deal with Bermingham going down tomorrow? Can’t you say you got a tip? Surely to God you’re not still trying to protect me and Jinky’s. The last thing I’m worried about at this point is having the law around.”
“I’ve told them. I told my supervisor and she told me she’d put eyes on it. Have you seen any eyes? Look Oren, you know I’m not stupid. I’m not paranoid and I don’t get my feelings hurt easy and I’m telling you that I am being watched. I am under the scope. Things are moving around me and I’m being kept out of the loop and that makes me really fucking nervous.”
Redemption Key (A Dani Britton Thriller) Page 14
