Redemption Key (A Dani Britton Thriller) (14 page)

7:40am, 89° F

Oren swore into his glass when Caldwell strolled into the bar. He’d forgotten to tell his buddy that the Wheeler meeting hadn’t gone down yesterday. Caldwell wanted an update and knew better than to do it on the phone. Now Oren had an FBI agent in his bar and the Wheelers on the way. If that Bermingham cat tried to pull something, Oren didn’t want to guarantee anyone’s safety around Juan and Joaquin.

“What’s the good news?” Caldwell climbed onto his stool, throwing out his customary greeting without looking.

“Don’t have a lick of it.” Oren’s expected response. Then, voice lowered: “Our Canadian friend is not happy about the meeting being put off a day. And Juan is not happy with the way Bermingham spoke to him on the phone when Juan gave him the news, which, of course, gets Joaquin excited, thinking that heads are going to roll. And an excited Joaquin Wheeler is an unsavory sight.”

“From what I’ve been able to unearth, that’s SOP for Vincente. Makes people wait. Gets them on edge. Makes them screw up.”

“It’s a good plan unless the screwup involves a couple of dusted-up sadists with guns.”

Caldwell nodded. “It seems Bermingham’s no stranger to that, even in his brief tenure as bad guy. They call him Baby Bermie and he’s a rising star. Took down a couple of big operations through Detroit and Windsor, all the way to Buffalo. Word is he wants to move Vincente out and take over Miami. He hits hard and fast, and the people that do survive working with him are suddenly struck with a lifelong inability to remember his face.”

“That’s a nice skill.” Oren closed his eyes. “What do you figure he uses? Hypnosis?”

Caldwell chuckled. “Probably something more along the lines of aversion therapy. Which is why I completely understand if you are unable to get a picture of his face for me.”

Oren just sighed. He was a big believer in the power of aversion therapy. “What do you suppose he’s doing all the way down here? That’s a big territory gap. Don’t they have enough heroin in Canada?”

“The bad news is I haven’t told you the bad news yet. I can’t get any of my usual sources to tell me anything definite about what Vincente’s moving, but he has something Bermingham wants and he wants it badly. It’s a safe bet it isn’t antiques and I’m getting a bad feeling it isn’t drugs either. And Vincente is using this heat wave to put the screws to the deal.”

“The heat? What’s that got to do with anything? Surely Bermingham can afford air conditioning and a bag of ice.”

“Whatever they’re moving doesn’t do well in the heat.”

Oren rolled his glass between his palms. “No chance we’re talking about an illegal shipment of gourmet cheese, huh?”

“Not likely. And not likely to be coming up from points south. Good cheese is usually from the north.” Caldwell took a sip from Oren’s glass and grimaced. “No, my friend, I think the reason the Wheelers have such a hard-on for this gig is that they’re rising in Vincente’s ranks. Simon Vincente has his fingers in a lot of nasty pies and I have a bad feeling this particular deal involves a shipment of things that go boom.”

“Nice to know I can still be surprised.” Oren upended his glass. “Wait. Explosives? Who would Canada be bombing?”

Caldwell laughed. “Terrorists these days like to shop around. Maybe the Canadian dollar gives them a better rate on the international market. I don’t get the impression either Bermingham or Vincente are what you’d call patriots to their respective flags.”

“Well Juan and Bermingham are putting the finals on the deal at ten thirty this morning,” Oren said. Peg was nowhere in sight, and Dani was still showing Mr. Tiger Beat around. Nobody seemed in a hurry to get their next drink. “At least we won’t have long to worry.”

7:40am, 89° F

Dani drew back the mosquito netting, tying it into a thick knot to give them both a little more room in the cramped shack. Less than ten feet long and twelve feet wide, every inch of the refurbished space came in handy. Choo-Choo leaned sideways on the cot to reach the blue-and-gray yarn monstrosity hanging in place of what would have been the headboard.

“I’ll bite,” he said, his fingers dipping through loose stitches and over glittery appliquéd flowers. “Is this some sort of native dress?”

She laughed, looking away. She couldn’t say why it made her uncomfortable to see someone touching the shawl. It was one of the few things she’d taken with her when she’d left DC. “Sort of, I guess. You might say it’s a traditional trailer park ceremonial garb. When a Kenny Chesney T-shirt just won’t do.”

She should have known that Choo-Choo, with his scary-good hearing, would catch the tension in her voice. He’d been an audio analyst at Rasmund. They both had their talents. He wrapped a frayed
tassel of gray fringe around his middle finger and looked back at her, cocking an elegant eyebrow.

“Remember how I told you that when I was little, my mom got sick?”

He nodded. “Mentally.”

“Yeah, crazy.” For some reason that made her relax. Choo-Choo had a way of making ugly things casual and hard things easy. “So while my dad was on the road, I went from relative to relative. We moved from Norman down to Flat Road and points south. I moved from house to house and trailer to trailer. Nobody treated me badly but everyone made it really clear that I was part of their Christian obligation.”

“That sounds warm.”

“Yeah. The one exception was my Aunt Penny. She was my mom’s cousin’s ex-wife or something. I’m really not sure, but they must have been pretty desperate to put her on the list of people who had to take me.”

“Those Christian obligations do add up quickly, don’t they?”

Dani nodded. “Aunt Penny drank and smoked and I’m not entirely sure she wasn’t a prostitute on the side. She had a lot of men coming through there but was also really, really funny. She’d laugh all the time and I remember that she was the only person in all those years who was genuinely happy to see me show up on her doorstep. The rest of them thought I couldn’t tell, but kids know, you know? They can feel it when someone is happy to see them and when someone isn’t.”

Choo-Choo stared at the ugly shawl as if he could see its history played out in the stitches. “And Aunt Penny made this for you?”

“No, nothing that heartwarming. She gave it to me.” Dani straightened out a blue felt flower hanging by a thread. “Uncle Bill and Aunt Ruth were taking me to Aunt Penny, and I realized I’d left my coat at their house. It was my favorite. It was from Toronto and
it had a cowboy stitched on the pocket. I cried and cried but Aunt Ruth said we were already an hour from their place and it was too far to go back and get it. I was still crying when we got to Aunt Penny’s. She told me that she had something better than some old coat and pulled this out.”

“And you thought it was gorgeous.”

“No, I knew it was hideous.” Choo-Choo snorted at that and Dani grinned. “I was eleven; I wasn’t blind. But by then I knew to take my kindness where I could get it.” She smoothed the lumpy knit against the wall and stepped away. “So now I take that ugly thing everywhere I go. I can’t seem to get rid of it. I swear they’re going to bury me in it. And speaking of taking things everywhere you go,” Dani nodded at his backpack between his feet. “Did you bring clothes?”

Choo-Choo looked around the small shack. “Did you? Aside from your glamour-shawl?”

“They’re in the bait shop. I usually just dress in there.”

“I’ll assume you have your reasons.” He toed the canvas bag. “And yeah, I usually keep a couple things with me. It’s not quite a Rasmund pouch but . . .”

“Comes in handy all the same, doesn’t it?”

“You mean when someone swoops in to pluck you from your life?”

With Choo-Choo on the small cot, there wasn’t anywhere else to sit except to hop up onto the little cabinet that served as her kitchen. “I guess I didn’t think this through, bringing you down here. You can sleep on the cot. I don’t really sleep that much.”

“I was just going to say the same thing.”

“About not thinking this through?”

“About not sleeping much.” He smoothed the cheap sheets along the aluminum frame. “Beds are just sort of a prop for me these days.”

“I sleep on the kayak dock.” She tipped her head out toward the inlet. “Well, I lie on it and close my eyes for a while at least.”

He lay back, unfolding himself and stretching long, the old cot barely creaking under his graceful motion. He stared up into the low ceiling beams. “It’s weird, isn’t it? This? Me being here. When you think about it, we hardly even know each other and yet you are the only person I’ve wanted to see for months. I have a confession to make.”

Dani didn’t trust herself to speak. She crossed her legs, folding herself up small, and waited for him to keep talking. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry and when he did speak, she could barely hear him over the calls of the birds and rustle of the hot breeze through the date palms.

“When I couldn’t find you, when I couldn’t find anyone with your name in Oklahoma”—he closed his eyes and Dani had to lean forward to hear him—“I thought . . . I started to think that maybe you were in on it too.”

She nearly fell forward, her disbelief coming out in a short, hard breath.

He draped his arm over his eyes. “I didn’t know what to think. I knew I had to be careful. I couldn’t go on a full-blown search for you. Feds were watching; my family was watching. I was busy kicking that whole brain-melting drug slavery thing they’d gifted me with. Maybe that’s what made me paranoid, but I kept thinking about Rasmund and how we’d worked in that building where they were torturing political prisoners. Torturing them right under our feet. Right under our noses and we never knew. I never knew.”

“I didn’t know.”

“I know. I know that now. I knew it then.” He raised himself up on his elbows and looked at her. “I did. It’s just that I was in there for so long and you were gone. They kept asking me these questions about you. I don’t know if they were trying to plant seeds in my mind, playing some sort of fucked-up game to keep us from connecting again, or if I was just pissed off and needing someone to be mad at. Someone who didn’t hold my life in their hand. And then I couldn’t find you in Oklahoma. You said you were going back to
Oklahoma, and I couldn’t find any trace of you there. I thought either you’d lied to me or that they’d done something to keep you from getting to Oklahoma.” He dropped back down on the cot, shaking his head. “And I can’t even tell you which one of those two was a worse thought to dwell on.”

“I couldn’t find you either.”

He nodded. “But I didn’t see you get shot.”

He let the words hang there. Dani watched him lie still, his breathing even, his beautiful face smooth. Of all the things she’d expected to feel with Choo-Choo, anger wasn’t one of them.

“What does that mean?”

“It means the last thing I saw was our boss ordering someone to pull the trigger. And I keep going back to those long phone conversations you kept having with Tom, the man our boss hired to kill us all. We were running for our lives and I heard you tell Tom that you trusted him. He was hired to kill us and you chatted with him over and over again that night.”

“I didn’t ‘chat’ with him, Choo-Choo.” She gripped the edge of the counter, lowering her feet toward the ground. Ready to pounce on him. Punch him, pound on him, erase his suspicion with blood and broken bones. “You have no idea what happened that night.”