Orchid Beach (38 page)
“I already thought about it,” Barney replied, “but I didn’t know I was going to be lucky enough to get you, too, bitch.” He raised Holly’s weapon and fired two shots into Jane’s chest. She was thrown against the wall and collapsed on the floor.
As the second shot was being fired Holly moved. She ran at him and hit him low, driving her shoulder into a kidney and taking him down. Daisy got hold of an ankle.
Barney dropped one of the guns and used his free hand to take Holly by the hair, pulling her head back. But Holly had hold of his other wrist and was able to keep the gun pointed away from her.
Barney had size and strength on Holly, but she was younger and no weakling, and she had the advantage of desperation, not to mention Daisy’s help. His face was close to hers, and she managed to drive an elbow into his eye, hurting him enough that he let go of her hair. She tried to pin him to the floor, but he rolled over and dragged her to her feet, snaking an arm around her waist and taking her weight off the floor.
Daisy still clung to his ankle, resisting all attempts by Noble to kick her away. Holly jammed a thumb into his uninjured eye and twisted it, hanging on to his wrist for dear life. The gun went off once, then again, shattering a
display of crockery with the first shot and putting the second dead center through the picture window. Holly could see a car in the street slow down for some rubbernecking.
Holly got some traction again and sank a punch into Barney’s solar plexus. Then, with all her strength, she drove him backward. The two smashed through the punctured picture window together, landing in the azaleas outside the window, taking Daisy with them, Holly on top. Barney was now virtually blind and very winded, and when Holly sank her teeth into his thumb he let go of the pistol. She rolled them both away from it and began punching him with both fists wherever she could—face, neck, belly. The sprinklers were soaking them both, and they were making the lawn muddy. Finally she got him turned over, facedown, with his wrist between his shoulder blades. She got that wrist cuffed and used the leverage to cause him enough pain that he stopped resisting. She cuffed both hands behind his back. “Release, Daisy,” she said to the dog, and Daisy backed off, still growling.
Holly got Barney up on his toes and marched him toward her police car. She shoved him into the backseat and slammed the door. He was as good as in a jail cell now, with the wire barrier between the front and rear seats, and rear doors that wouldn’t open from the inside. She went into the house and checked on Jane. She was dead. Then she went back to the car and grabbed the radio microphone.
“Base, this is the chief,” she said.
“This is base, Chief, go ahead.”
“Get an ambulance and a coroner out to Jane Grey’s address; she’s dead of a gunshot wound. Find Hurd Wallace and tell him to get out here, too, to secure the scene. I have Barney Noble in custody. I want a paramedic to treat him
for superficial wounds at the station, when I get him there.”
“Roger, Chief,” the man said. “I’m on it.”
Holly put the microphone back in its cradle and turned to look at Barney Noble, who had struggled into a sitting position. One eye was already closed, and he was squinting at her with the other.
“Bitch,” he said.
“Barney,” she replied, “coming from you, that’s the highest praise I’ve ever had.”
H
olly waited for Hurd Wallace to arrive and take over the scene, then she drove Barney Noble to the station and booked him on three counts of homicide. Jane Grey was dead, and Holly was the eyewitness to her murder. She had never cared much for the death penalty, but now, in the case of Barney Noble, she had become enthusiastic.
When her work was done, she drove home, showered and tried to go to sleep. It couldn’t be done. She dressed in a fresh uniform and drove out to Palmetto Gardens. An FBI agent was manning the front gate.
“Where’s Harry Crisp?” she asked the man.
“At the com center, I think. I just let in some guy from the safe company.”
Holly drove into the compound and out to the com center. Federal agents, still in their black clothes and heavily armed, stood around the front door, looking bored.
“Harry inside?” she asked a man she knew.
“Yeah, Holly, go on in.”
Holly went into the building and downstairs to the vault room. Harry and a group of agents stood around watching a middle-aged man in a nerd outfit—polyester trousers, short-sleeved dress shirt, tie, pocket protector—open a briefcase, take out a sheet of paper and start to turn the dial on the door of the vault. He turned a large wheel, and the door swung open a few inches.
“Jesus,” Harry said, “how’d you do that so fast?”
“It was easy,” the man replied. “I had the combination.”
“Oh.”
“We keep the combinations of all our safes, just in case.”
Harry stepped forward, took hold of the door and swung it slowly open. “Okay,” he said, “let’s see what we’ve got here.”
Holly followed him inside the vault room, which was, she reckoned, about eighteen by twenty-four feet. She stopped and stared. The room was filled with steel shelving and crisscrossed by aisles. On many of the shelves, stacked from floor to ceiling, were shrink-wrapped blocks of currency.
Harry took a block off a shelf and cut through the plastic wrapping. “Twenties, fifties and hundreds,” he said. He read a label. “There’s half a million dollars in this one package.”
There were some whistles, then silence, as the group toured the room.
“Bearer bonds,” Harry said, thumbing through a stack of certificates. “Hundreds, thousands of them.”
At the rear of the room were two steel cabinets with
shallow drawers. Harry opened them to reveal trays of cut diamonds. In other drawers were rows of gold coins, mostly Krugerrands.
Holly finally managed to speak. “This is breathtaking,” she said. “Is there this much cash anywhere else in the world?”
“Maybe at the Federal Reserve Bank in New York,” Harry said. “Hardly anyplace else.”
“Why is it here?” she asked.
“I don’t know, but I expect the computer data will tell us.” He turned to his men. “All right, I want an inventory, and I want it fast. The currency will be easy, since the packages are labeled. Count the Krugerrands and the diamonds; estimate the weight of each stone. There are gold bars over there. I want this done pronto!”
Holly followed Harry out of the vault and upstairs.
“Let’s go up another floor and see how our guys are doing with the computers,” he said.
Holly followed him to the top floor, where she was introduced to the head computer man.
“What have you got so far?” Harry asked.
“What we seem to have here are two things: one, a scheduling operation for drug shipments all over the world, from the poppy fields and jungles to the streets of American cities; and two, a collection point for cash from every corner of the United States.”
“We found a hell of a lot of that downstairs in the vault,” Harry said.
“They were shipping it out of here to points in South America and Europe,” the computer man said.
“How?”
“Apparently, in the corporate jets that brought people
into the complex. Customs did their usual searches when the planes came in, but nobody searches departing aircraft. They brought in passengers and took out passengers and money.”
“We’ve already found half a dozen drug lords in residence,” Harry said. “They come here for R and R and to collect their revenues and take them home. We’re doing an analysis of the flight plans in and out of here that isn’t complete yet, but when we’re finished, we’ll know where the money was going.”
“Any idea how much money is down there?” the computer man asked.
“Not yet. Soon.”
Holly sat in the Palmetto Gardens Country Club dining room over lunch with Harry Crisp and some of his men. An FBI agent came into the room, walking fast, looking around. He spied Harry, came over to the table and handed him a sheet of paper.
Harry looked at it for about a minute, while everyone else waited to find out what was going on. Finally, he spoke. “The estimated value of the contents of the vault is a little over
two billion dollars
,” he said.
There was the sound of people sucking in breath, then a long silence.
“Harry,” Holly asked, “since you’re confiscating all this money on what is, after all,
my
turf, do you think I might be able to get a helicopter for my department?”
“Holly, I’ll get you a squadron of jet fighters, if you like, and anything else your little heart desires.”
“The helicopter will do for starters,” Holly said. “Then I’ll see what else I can think of.”
T
he evening was growing cool. Holly and Jackson sat on the beach, warmed by a driftwood fire. Daisy lay between them, her head in Holly’s lap, having her ears stroked. Eight months had passed since the Palmetto Gardens Bust, as it had become known across the country. Barney Noble was due to go on trial the following month; more than a hundred other people had taken plea bargains or been convicted of various federal and state crimes. Harry Crisp had netted eight major drug lords and more than a hundred of their underlings. Various federal law-enforcement agencies had been using Palmetto Gardens for training and recreational purposes, and a huge auction of the property would take place in another few months.
Harry Crisp was now the agent in charge of the Miami office of the Bureau, and there was talk in the papers of his being promoted to deputy director of the FBI, in a reshuffle
at the Bureau. He and Holly had both been decorated by the director.
Jackson stroked Holly’s cheek. “You think you might have everything under control, now?”
“Just about,” Holly said. “But it won’t be over for me until Barney Noble has been convicted.”
“I can understand that,” Jackson said. “I was just wondering if you might be able to take two or three weeks off between now and the trial.”
“I’ve got the vacation time coming,” she said. “What did you have in mind?”
“I don’t know, where would you like to go on your honeymoon?”
Holly held his hand still. “Am I getting married?”
“Yep.”
“Anybody I know?”
“Yep.”
“When?”
“The sooner, the better. I know a judge who will perform the ceremony on short notice.”
“Wow,” Holly said.
“Wow, what?”
“I never really thought I’d get married.”
“Life is full surprises,” he said, kissing her. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“You didn’t really ask me, did you?”
“I asked you where you’d like to go on your honeymoon.”
“Oh, that,” Holly said.
“Hawaii? Europe? The Caribbean?”
Holly hugged Daisy and smiled at her fiancé. “Anyplace that takes bitches,” she said.
“I figured,” Jackson replied.
I would like to thank my editor, HarperCollins Vice President and Associate Publisher Gladys Justin Carr, and her assistants, Elissa Altman and Deirdre O’Brien, for their hard work on and on behalf of this book. I would also like to thank Laura Leonard for her efforts in publicizing this and previous books.
I would also like to thank my agents, Morton L. Janklow and Anne Sibbald, as well as everyone else at Janklow & Nesbit for their continuing fine work in furthering my career.
I must also express my gratitude to my wife, Chris, who is always the first to read a manuscript. Her keen eye and sharp tongue help keep me out of trouble.
Finally, I would like to thank those people in a certain Florida town (which Orchid Beach may, in some ways, but not others, resemble) who have so quickly made us feel at home.
STUART WOODS
is the bestselling author of thirty-three books including
Swimming to Catalina, Dead in the Water, Dirt,
and
Choke.
Among his other top-selling books are
Deep Lie, Palindrome, New York Dead, Santa Fe Rules,
and
Chiefs
. He lives on Florida’s Treasure Coast. Find out more about Stuart Woods and correspond with him at wwww.stuartwoods.com
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.
PRAISE
FOR STUART WOODS AND
ORCHID BEACH
“Barker—tough and tight-lipped—is fun to watch as she maneuvers among city politicians and wary colleagues, one of whom maybe a murderer.”
—
Entertainment Weekly
“An entertaining suspense story…. Barker is tough when she needs to be, and clever and persistent in following her hunches.”
—
School Library Journal
SWIMMING TO CATALINA
“A heck of a plot, intrigue and cover-up between the first and last page.”
—
San Antonio Express News
“This enjoyable, star-dusted plunge into Hollywood’s dark side agreeably melds ’90s glitz with classic noir.”
—
People
magazine
“A fast-paced thriller…. A tight storyline that never loses focus while barreling to an exciting finale…. Woods…keeps readers interested.”
—
Rocky Mountain News
“Outstanding…. After nearly two dozen books, Woods can still surprise readers, not only with clever plots and characters, but also with his knowledge of everything from aeronautics to yachtsmanship.”