Cooler Than Blood (26 page)

CHAPTER 44

T
he pink Moorish hotel was built in the 1920s by an Irishman from Virginia, named after a character in a play from a French dramatist that was turned into an English opera, and is set in a city named for its Russian counterpart.

I still have no idea what all that means.

I hadn’t been spending my usual time there. It was like coming home to a crowded place where you know virtually no one, yet that anonymity renders it so comfortable, so familiar, so reassuring.

Sheri had a beer and a glass of water on the bar before I settled into a high bar chair that faced the Gulf. I tossed my ball cap onto the white chair next to me to reserve it for my guest. I took the envelope out of my shirt pocket and placed it on the bar.

Sheri inquired, “Walk into a telephone pole?”

“Banged my head pretty good,” I replied, and drained half the beer. A headband that PC had given me partially covered a white gauze pad.

“But I should see the pole, right?”

“Yeah…” I came up for air. “I taught it a real lesson.”

She moved on, correctly accessing my nonconfessional mood. The pools on both sides of me clattered with the staccato voices of children that mixed incongruously with the music floating out of hidden speakers. I thought of the young girl in Fort Myers Beach who had barked before diving for her bone. I don’t think much about little people. They rarely enter my circumference. But something about that little girl’s barking, her diving to the bottom. What a little ball of energy. A real spitfire.
“Hey, mister. Can you get my bone?”

I didn’t need that in my head.

I shifted my gaze to the left. A few seats farther toward the Gulf sat a young girl, maybe ten. Or eight. Or twelve. How do you know? Four years doesn’t mean much in your thirties, but eight to twelve is a fifty percent jump. Her father ordered a beer and a drink “with an umbrella in it” for his daughter. She was absorbed in passionately coloring a placemat and never raised her head.
What’s with the father-daughter sightings?
Usually it’s the flesh parade. Are they always here, or am I just seeing them for the first time?
I glanced toward a man who was berating the woman next to him—I assumed she was his wife—with an endless barrage of sports talk as he kept his eyes riveted to the TV screen. She sat erect and fanned herself with the plastic bar menu. She wore a stylish cover-up over her swimsuit. Her eyes wandered, but not far. Her drink was half gone, and her free hand rested on the bar. I felt like telling weeble brain that his wife didn’t give two shits about what was happening on the screen.

Joseph Dangelo picked up my cap and placed it on the counter. “I like your office,” he said.

“I didn’t say it was my office.” I kept my eyes on the weeble. Who thinks a woman wants to come to a beach bar on the Gulf of Mexico and watch TV? I turned my attention to Dangelo. “I said it was where I conduct my business.” He wore a soft, white, short-sleeve shirt and deep-beige slacks. Neither had a wrinkle nor, as far as I could tell, a stain. “Buy you a drink?”

“I’ll take what you’re having.”

I caught Sheri’s eye and held up two fingers. I needed a second round. I turned back to Dangelo. “How’s business, Joe?”

“I doubled my money on my last deal.”

“You withheld vital information from me.”

He looked away then came back to me. He started slow, like he was processing each word. “Wallace—that’s how we knew him—Rutledge might have engaged in…creative means of paying off his debt. Certainly you understand that the nature of such things is not to be discussed. I divulged with you, at our last meeting at the restaurant, what I could. I’m sure by now you’ve reached the same conclusion.”

My instinct was to contend his statement, but he was correct, so I let it go. “I hope the doubling of your profit, coupled with the convenient exit of a potentially embarrassing associate, solidified your leadership position.”

He nodded. “I’m quite the hero, although as I told you, I’m rarely referenced as a leader. I think of myself more as a facilitator.”

“I understand Chuck Duke’s buddy has a slight limp.”

I was glad he was a hero in his own house; I wanted Joseph Dangelo to wield untouchable power. Sheri placed a beer in front of each of us. Dangelo touched it curiously. Guess he wasn’t one to drink from plastic. “No grudges,” he told me. “I assure you, if anything, we are in your debt. We owe
you
.”

“No one owes anyone anything. That would imply that we’ll see each other again, and that’s not going to happen.”

He took a sip of his beer, paused, and took another one. He turned back to me. “As I said, we may have overreacted regarding what a certain woman—a deceased woman—might have known.” He let that hang, but I didn’t grab it, so he continued. “We are more than even, Jacob. You had a chance to take things in a different direction that night at Rutledge’s sister’s house. You—and I certainly don’t want to come off even close to condescending here—chose wisely. You and Mr. Duke performed flawlessly.”

“Nor do I desire to condescend, but had I not been in such a benevolent mood, you’d be missing two hundred eighty-four grand and placing a want ad for two new associates.”

Dangelo tilted his head away from me and shook it side to side in disapproval, as if he’d finally given up. His hand flipped off his beer as if it were an involuntary act then settled back around it. “Do you always slip so…effortlessly into violence? Is there no middle ground for you?”

I thought of Hadley III gifting dead chameleons to me. She was a cat. She had no choice. No excuses.

“This
is
my middle ground.” I said it because it was an easy thing to say, and as a general rule, I tackle the big issues tomorrow. I cut a look to my right and saw a little girl wrapped in a white towel. As she walked, it swept the paver bricks behind her like a royal robe. Her father trailed her, holding sand toys in his hand. Bright red and yellow. What did they do today? Give a discount to father-daughter combos?

“Any particular reason you wanted to see me?” Dangelo asked. His eyes dropped down to the envelope I’d placed on the bar then back to me.

Inside the envelope were pictures of Theresa Ann Howell, his daughter. My Excalibur. The original plan was to trade Dangelo’s daughter for Jenny. It didn’t work that way. No surprise. I’ve never known an original plan that went the distance. I wonder why we even bother. Then Dangelo had hinted—he’d never expressively stated as much, but my foolish reaction that night in his condo was all he needed—that he knew Kathleen’s prior identity. Plan B: if anything happened to Kathleen, he’d never see the young woman in the picture again. A simple plan. A clean plan. An everybody-acts-in-his-best-interest plan.

The classics never go out of style.

But I couldn’t find any reason Dangelo, or his organization, should feel threatened by Kathleen, and more important, I found no evidence that they seriously believed she was a threat. Or
had
been a threat. It was a fabrication, and it was over. Both sides knew it. Dangelo had told me as much when we’d last met at the restaurant.
Fight no more forever.
But I’d rather have blackmail over a man like Dangelo than his word.

I placed my hand on the envelope.

“I asked you a question, Jacob.”

Something else had been gnawing inside me. I realized my zealousness for saving Jenny had been fueled by more than my desire to help Susan, protect Kathleen, and rescue a girl I didn’t know—as if all that were not enough. A week of pills and booze had stripped me of several layers and found the hard wood underneath.

I’d done it for a man I never knew. Whose gravesite I’d visited on a hot summer day in Ohio, before I’d camped out and the temperature and the sun had fallen in harmony. Before the bugs ate me, the birds woke me, and the water froze me. A man whose grave held the same insignia I’d worn for five years. A man in my foxhole. At his gravesite, I’d made a promise to a man that I would represent him. I would stand in for him. I would fight his most important battle. When I was airborne and about to crash the barn door with my feet, I wanted to save Larry Spencer’s daughter.

How does a man feel about his daughter? I haven’t a clue. I don’t know if I ever will. I hope I did right.

“Jacob?”

“Hey, mister. Can you get my bone?”
She wore a yellow bathing suit with pink straps. Her face was wet. Drops of water beaded on her skin like rain on a freshly waxed car hood. A pencil-dot mole was on her right cheek, as if God had placed an inspection tag on her when she’d rolled off the assembly line. Approved by God. It don’t get any better than that, baby. What does a man do to protect that? What kind of beast threatens that?

Kathleen’s voice now in my head.
“What kind of man would that be
—
a man who holds another man’s daughter as a hostage?”

“Mr. Travis?”

I’d put the questions off for too long, pretending they were in a different language, one I didn’t know. But now they cloaked me, and I needed to shake them off like a dog throwing off water.

By protecting Kathleen, would I become someone, some
thing
, she could never love? Did I need to sacrifice my love to save her life? No. No, that’s not it. Not my love for her, but her love for me. Does it work like that? Can you turn your heart, or someone else’s, off? Let me know how that works out.

Think
.

I was at a crossroads, yet my mind was dormant. I needed it to fire up and to bring forth with clarity those answers that I sought. I didn’t want the heat from my blood to control my thoughts. I sought to be calm. Be cool. Cooler than blood.

I picked up the envelope from the bar and placed it in my shirt pocket. I looked at Dangelo and found his eyes waiting for me.

“Joseph?”

“Yes?”

“Care for some hummus and pita bread?”

“You’re not going to share that envelope with me?”

“No.”

“But you have an envelope.”

“I do.”

“May I ask?”

“Monthly bar bill.”

Joseph Dangelo’s eyes drifted to my shirt pocket then came back to me. “Okay,” he said in a nonchalant voice. “Let us break some bread.”

CHAPTER 45

K
athleen, Susan, and Jenny—in that order—sat at the end of my dock.

Kathleen and Susan.
What was I thinking? Maybe you’re
not
supposed to wash pain-killers down with booze.

I had just returned from the hotel. Before I joined them, I placed the envelope with the pictures of Theresa Ann Howell in my fireproof safe and retrieved a box from the closet. As I started down my dock, I heard laughter. Probably laughing at me. On my dock.

“Does it still hurt?” Jenny asked when I took a seat next to her. “I am
so
sorry.” She wore a bandage high on her forehead that blended with her skin tone. Rutledge’s gun had left a nasty mark.

Morgan told me that on the trip home from Rutledge’s—I have no memory of it—she held my head in her lap and gushed apologies. She had since called every day to check in on me.

“Not at all,” I said. “And you?” I felt ten years older than I did seven days ago, but I wasn’t going to lay that on her.

“Never better. The doctor doesn’t think it’ll scar.”

I glanced at Kathleen. “Everyone make introductions?” She wore the new dress I had bought for her.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “We figured it all out.”

Those words covered a lot of ground.

She smiled and looked at Susan, who turned to me and added, “We managed just fine without you. We were discussing the trip to the hospital the night you found Jenny. Jenny said they rebandaged her head then had her on humidified oxygen for a while, due to her coughing. Kathleen said you didn’t want to go—”

“But I,” Kathleen interjected, “had insisted. Not only to stop the bleeding, but also I wanted a brain scan—they called it a neuroimage—of your head. Morgan told me you sang ‘Old Kentucky Home’ on the ride back.”

“And I,” Susan took over, “said, ‘How did that go?’ And Kathleen said—”

“It was negative,” Kathleen cut in.

What’s with the tag team?
Have these women known each other for years?

“In fact,” she continued, “the nurse offered to give me my money back. Said there was nothing up there to scan.”

They all laughed. Again. At me. On
my
dock.

Susan calmed down and said, “Jenny was telling Kathleen that she was almost out of the barn herself. She’d been swinging away at the door with the hatchet before you flew in.”

I glanced at Jenny. “My head aches for nothing?”

“I thought you said it didn’t hurt.” She sounded more pained than I felt.

I held her hazel eyes for a moment. Her hair was straight and long. The last time I’d seen it, I’d registered it as molded sea oats. She wore a pair of Top-Siders. No one else wore shoes.

I said, “Been meaning to ask you something.”

“I think I know. The hatchet? Why I took a swing at you?”

“Just curious.”

“I had no choice. I’d been kidnapped three times, and I knew…I knew my time was running out. I found that hatchet and decided the next guy through the door got it. When the fire broke out, I went to work on the door right around the lock area that you broke through. But I was losing. I—”

She hung her head toward the water, but brought it right back up. To our right and out a distance, a dolphin broke the surface and tossed a fish out in front of itself. The dolphin came up several yards away and tossed the fish again. They do that sometimes—play ball with dinner. Jenny paid no attention, or maybe she didn’t see it.

“It’s the only part that gives me nightmares,” she continued. “The smoke—you just can’t believe the smoke. And it was a hatchet. Just a lousy hatchet.” She turned to me. “You came in high and scared me. How’d you do that? Come in six feet off the ground?”

“I jumped.”

“I don’t know what it was, but that wasn’t a jump. Then you fell, just collapsed, and when you got back up, I went after you. I am
so
sorry. I was in panic mode.”

“Don’t worry. I’m glad you only nicked me.”

“Trust me,” she said, shaking her head, “it wasn’t due to lack of effort. I went straight for you. I couldn’t believe how fast you reacted. I thought you were dazed, disorientated, but you practically jerked your head clean off your shoulders. Then Garrett was there and dragged us both out, and I have
no
idea how he managed that.”

I
had
jerked my head with amazing speed. Did the bourbon actually help me? Something to consider.

Susan asked me, “Do you remember much from afterward?”

I’d avoided looking at her, much like the day I’d walked into her house to meet McGlashan. I’m good at that—not looking at Susan Blake. I looked now. She wore long gold earrings, and as she tilted her head to see around Jenny, the left one swung out over the water. She looked younger than the last time I’d seen her. Her hair was different; it was shorter, and I wanted to tell her that it looked nice, but instead I said, “Bits and pieces.” But what I was thinking was,
What type of woman owns a Grady-White and wears a tight black dress?
I would never really know, but I knew my thoughts weren’t done with me. That’s the thing about our thoughts and questions—we think they’re part of us, but they aren’t. They have their own life, their own schedule. They can, and will, strike at any moment, on any subject, with brutal and naked honesty.

“We’re having dinner with them, Garrett and Morgan, right?” Jenny asked. “I haven’t had the chance to thank them again.”

“They’re kitesurfing. Due back any time.” I handed her the box. “For you.”

She gave me a quizzical look. “For me?”

“For you.”

It wasn’t wrapped. She popped the top and pulled out her cheer T-shirt. I was surprised it wasn’t ripped. Billy Ray must have jerked it clean off her body.

“Oh, my gosh,” Jenny gushed. Did I screw up? Maybe it was the last thing she ever wanted to see. For a delicate few seconds, no one spoke, and then Jenny turned to me and said, “Thank you. You can’t believe how hard I worked for this—and to keep it.” She shook her head, and her fingers caressed the garment. She neatly folded the T-shirt, placed it gently back in the box, and rested her hands on it.

“Help me in the kitchen?” Kathleen said to Susan. Kathleen and kitchen—the only familiarity they shared was the first letter.

“Thought you’d never ask.” The two BFFs departed. I was surprised they didn’t hold hands and skip.

Jenny and I sat for a silent minute. What was she thinking? I had my opportunity. I wanted to know; I deserved to know.

“Been meaning to ask you something else,” I said, echoing my earlier comment.

Jenny glanced at me. “Yes.”

“That night on the beach? I heard the cut tape of your conversation with Rutledge. You don’t have to—I mean, if you’re uncomfortable, I certainly understand. If you don’t mind, I just wonder if you could give me the whole story.” It came out pretty damn awkward, but I was wary of leading her where she didn’t want to go.

“You think I left something out?”

“Maybe.” I thought of point-blank asking Jenny if someone else was there that night, but I didn’t want to scare her off. Was she protecting someone? Did someone else kill Billy Ray Coleman?

She nodded as in approval, waited a second, then said, “I don’t mind. I already told Susan.”

I wasn’t sure if “I don’t mind” was something that carried utmost sincerity when prefaced with a pause, so I gave her an exit. “I can just get it from Sus—”

“No, silly.” A gust of wind tousled her hair, and she brushed it off her face, although by the time her hand had gotten there, the wind had already corrected the mess it had made. “I thought I was a goner…I’d pretty much shut down. You know about my father’s boat, right? The Trojan? You mentioned it in your delirious stage.”

“I do.”

“I used to pump it out with a busted hand pump in the cuddy. It was a slim shaft with no handle that fit perfectly in my hands. But it was difficult, since my hands were always slippery with teak oil. My dad…” She shook her head, and I caught a brief smile. “He couldn’t set foot in that boat without cleaning it.”

The more I learned about Larry Spencer, the more I lamented that our time didn’t cross.

“Anyway…” She brought her legs up under her and sat Indian style. “My hands were greasy—Billy Ray was smeared with lotion, which didn’t surprise me. His skin was fire red. My hand reached out, although for the life of me, I don’t remember sending that signal. I felt a mangrove branch. I wrapped my greasy hand around it. It felt exactly like that old pump in the cuddy of the boat. I jabbed it into Billy Ray’s stomach. But then everything sort of froze. He started to reach for it—no way was my single plunge going to save me, and…I didn’t know what to do.”

So far, her story was what she had given Rutledge. Perhaps my suspicion that she had omitted something was unfounded. She cut her eyes out to the water as a girl on a Jet Ski skimmed the bay’s surface. She straightened her back and focused her gaze directly at me.

“My father walked out of the mangroves like he’d never left me. He said, ‘Pump, Jenny. Pump.’ And that’s exactly what I did.” Her eyes were sure. If she expected me to question her story, she gave no hint. “I didn’t let him down,” she said, batting at her hair again. “I’m not that old, but some things in life you’re lucky to get a second chance at, and I wasn’t going to let him down. I pumped like the boat was sinking. I pumped because they put his death in the same article they put the deer harvest in. I pumped because I got crap for a mom, and I pumped because I wanted to kill Boone. I pumped”—she let her breath out as if she’d been holding it—“because I wanted to make him proud, and I thought it might be the last time I ever…I ever saw…”

Jenny’s eyes welled up, but she didn’t look away from me. If I’m ever in a fight and I get to pick sides, I’m picking this girl first. Her body gave a light shudder. She blew her breath out, and her shoulders settled down. Her eyes returned to the water. “I don’t think I let him down, all those years ago when I couldn’t pump very well. Heck…” She gave a slight shrug. “I was barely twelve. I know this, though.” She turned to me. “He sure as hell didn’t let me down. When I needed him, my father was there.”

Her words on the tape now made sense. No way was she going to tell Rutledge that her daddy had popped out of the mangroves and talked to her. Who knows what tricks the mind plays? Who’s to say what’s real and what isn’t? Perhaps natural laws themselves bow to the challenge of a father’s love of his daughter.

“Pump, Jenny. Pump,” I said.

“That I did,” she replied with a dismissive smile that was unbecoming of her. “I found myself on top of Billy Ray, that mangrove stick riding up and down, with his insides clinging to it like the thick motor my daddy used to drain out of the Trojan in the fall.”

“Well, there’s a pretty sight.”

She looked right at me, hesitated, then said, “How’d I do?”

Who did she see right then?

I heard Susan’s words as we stood in Jenny’s bedroom and she described Jenny’s father.
“He was a lot like you.”
I cut my thoughts short to address her question in a timely manner, as I didn’t want too much emptiness between her question and my answer. “You did fine. Just fine.” I felt as if I should put my arm around her and give her a good hug. I didn’t, and that haunts me to this day. Maybe if you can’t decide who you are, you’re nobody at all.

We joined the others, as Garrett and Morgan had returned. I started to introduce Susan to them, but it wasn’t necessary. Garrett and I migrated to the seawall away from the others.

“I talked to McGlashan,” I said, knowing McGlashan wasn’t Garrett’s prime interest but putting it off as much as I could.

“And?”

“Surprised, but not really. He said, looking back, he should have picked up signs that Rutledge wasn’t going by the book in looking into Jenny’s disappearance. The fact that she had left Ohio without telling her mother had clouded his judgment.”

“You ever find out what Super Bowl team McGlashan played for?”

“He didn’t. A friend did. Died of cancer and left the ring to him. McGlashan loved the game, but a birth defect left him with a gimpy shoulder. He was a water boy and spent his youth feeling sorry for himself. He wears the ring in memory of his buddy and to remind himself of how lucky he is.”

“You meet Dangelo?”

“At the hotel.”

“And?” he asked for the second time. Garrett held little interest in the peripheral.

“The pictures are in my safe.”

He waited for more, and when I didn’t offer it, he came back with, “Didn’t show them to him, did you?”

“No.”

He looked out toward the bay, where a towboat cautiously approached a small cruiser on the sandbar. “That’s your call.”

“It’s my call.”

We stood in silence for a few seconds. He turned, looked me in the eye, and headed to the side of the house. I assumed he’d shower off the salt with better success than he would have in accepting my decision not to show Dangelo pictures of his daughter, Theresa Ann Howell, emerging from work, drinking cocktails with friends, and buying a bouquet of brilliant flowers at the farmers’ market in Republic Square Park. That was to have been accompanied with my promise that bodily harm would befall her with a nod from my head if anything happened to Kathleen. To absolve him from the temptation to initiate action against Kathleen—and then to fake innocence by creating distance between himself and such action—I had planned to implicitly state that I couldn’t care less whether he was remotely responsible. It was a simple plan to protect Kathleen, and like I said, I always operate best when I possess clear goals.

Second-guessing and indecisiveness mounted their inevitable counterattacks. They swarmed my mind like invigorated adversaries. Was Dangelo being straight with me? I already knew that, at best, he’d been disingenuous when we’d discussed his knowledge of Rutledge at the restaurant. Why would I trust a man who belonged to an organization the FBI could easily trace to dozens of murders? I should’ve shown him the pictures of his daughter, let him know I have nuclear capabilities. Instead, I acted in what I thought was an intelligent and rational manner.