Redemption Key (A Dani Britton Thriller) (26 page)

But now this dark little girl with those serious brown eyes, who had crawled up into his life like some wounded wild animal that would suddenly permit him to feed her by hand, was turning out to be every inch the predator Caldwell painted her to be.

Here was the misdirect. This Tom Booker, this dangerous man who just happened to show up on Redemption on the weekend Bermingham made his play for control. She wanted his help; she wanted Caldwell’s help, even though just a day before she wouldn’t have spit on the agent if he were on fire. She wanted both men to be looking at this new stranger, protecting the tiny damsel in distress, so she and the people she worked for could tee them both up to be in the absolute wrong place at the wrong time. That place could be at ground zero of a federal bust or it could be at the messy end of Bermingham’s cleanup. Either way, that place would suck and Oren didn’t want to be there. He didn’t want to find out that his buddy Caldwell’s worst-case scenario could be far worse than either man imagined.

Shit, he really didn’t want Caldwell to be right at all.

He wanted to punch Dani and punch himself and keep punching until somebody made this situation right, but Oren hadn’t
survived Jinky and his own wasted youth by ignoring very clear signs of obvious danger. He knew he could trust Caldwell; that was one thing he didn’t question. So Oren bit back his anger and his almost overwhelming urge to beg Dani to explain herself to him. If she was a liar, she was an excellent one and there was too much at stake to risk falling under her spell.

“I don’t know what you want me to do, Dani. I’m your boss, not your dad.” The words tasted sour on his tongue so he spit them out as quickly as possible. “And I don’t need to borrow any trouble, especially not now. You want to call the law on that guy, be my guest. But don’t bring that shit into Jinky’s, you hear me?”

She stood there as he slid the glass door shut, turned his back on her, and headed deeper into his house. She wanted to say that he was the one who rented the room to Tom Booker; he was the one who brought the killer to Redemption Key.

But she didn’t say that because she knew that was a lie.

2:43pm, 106° F

She didn’t know how long she stood there. The sun beat down like it was trying to set the world on fire. It was a perfect day for it. This was a day when everything should burn. And the world didn’t even know it was coming to an end.

Dani thought about how nice it would be to drive. She could drive north, over the hundred little channels, over the staggering expanse of Seven Mile Bridge, being blinded by the glare off the water until she hit the mainland. She could keep driving. She could ignore the ache she knew she’d feel in her shoulder from sitting so long, the throb of the gunshot wound in her leg, until she fell out of the car wherever she ran out of gas. More gas, more driving, chewing espresso beans to keep her awake until she cleared Florida, maybe Louisiana, maybe Arkansas.

She could trade in her car, sacrifice her beloved little Honda for a head start evading the federal fuckers who would no doubt start looking for her. It would be a hard price to pay but it would be worth it to send those blunt-headed sons of bitches on a wild goose chase
through the bayou or through Texas or Kansas. Let them think she’d gone back to Oklahoma.

Like Choo-Choo had.

Dani walked the planked path without looking. Of course they’d find her. Everyone who wanted to find her would and the one person she wanted to stay with would lose her again. Would Choo-Choo care? Would he understand or figure she had her reasons? Would he take her place at Jinky’s or settle in with Casper’s crew and figure she was just another shit friend using him when she felt like she needed him?

Could she wait for him to come back from Casper’s boat? Take him with her? Would he go? He came to Florida. Dani tripped on a loose board at the broken corner of the old dock behind the hedge, turning her ankle against a rusted boat cleat. She felt the waxy sea grape stick to her skin as she bent to see blood drip down her foot. Who was she kidding? It didn’t matter if Choo-Choo was with her or not. It didn’t matter if Bermingham tied her up in the hull of his boat to a shipment of nuclear warheads bound for Syria or if Caldwell brought a battalion of Feds in to throw a net over her.

Tom Booker had found her.

Mr. Randolph couldn’t understand it. The Wheelers and Bermingham and all the badge-waving assholes who had and would surround her were nothing in the face of those wide blue eyes, that unblinking gaze that took Dani in like he owned her. No, like he’d made her, built her from scratch, like he knew her from the inside out. Even Choo-Choo wouldn’t understand. Her friend had seen Tom, had heard snippets of the long conversations he and Dani had shared on that endless night in DC, but Tom had been focused only on her. Choo-Choo hadn’t been pinned to the wall by those strong, steady hands. He hadn’t seen the force with which Tom had come at her with not one but two blades.

He had asked her, “Are you going to kill me, Dani?”

She’d told him yes. She had wanted to kill him and she’d relived that question over and over in a hundred nightmares. She’d thrown herself over a railing that night, willing to take her own life if it meant strangling Tom Booker, and what had she gotten for it? Scars and nightmares and a permanent federal tail. That psychotic son of a bitch didn’t even get a scratch. And he certainly didn’t get jail time.

She stood on the little abandoned dock, looking out toward the spot on the channel bridge that she jumped from every day. She wouldn’t leave Choo-Choo alone to face whatever was coming down at Jinky’s. Bermingham and Mr. Randolph and Special fucking Agent Daniel Caldwell thought they had Dani all figured out, that they knew her place and had some right to put her there. But what had Choo-Choo said last night at the airport? He did nothing but want and hate.

Choo-Choo was the only person who felt exactly the way she did.

She didn’t know who she’d run into first—Bermingham or Booker—so she kept her head down as she headed back to Jinky’s. She circled around the front, wanting to stay out of sight from anyone on the inlet as long as possible. The tinny sound of a bike bell made her jump. Throwing gravel to either side, a long-legged figure turned off the road, steering toward her. She saw long, brown shorts, a wide-brimmed straw hat, orange-rimmed sunglasses perched on a nose covered in zinc oxide, all of it eclipsed by the glare of a T-shirt in a shade of neon green found only on highway crews.

She stared as Choo-Choo skidded to a halt, pulling the plastic sunglasses off to hang from their equally tacky neon orange string. He grinned at her.

“I’ve decided to blend.”

Dani squinted against the glare of his shirt. “With who? Wham?”

He laughed. “Obscure, but I like it. I got the job. Casper hired me as first mate for his sunset cruise tonight. I suspect this will involve swabbing a good deal of tourist vomit.”

“So he stripped you of all your clothes and dressed you like that?”

“This?” Choo-Choo looked down at his shirt. “No, this was from a man renting one of Casper’s rowboats. It’s from someplace called”—he pulled the front of the shirt out to read the writing on the breast—“the Lizard’s Thicket in Gatlinburg, Tennessee. This guy admired my Black Dog shirt, said he’d always wanted to go to Cape Cod; I said this would get him closer, and we swapped shirts. Now I smell like fish heads and,” he sniffed the collar, “corn dogs, I think.”

Dani shook her head. “I’m trying to figure out who got the better end of this deal. If there even was a better end.” Choo-Choo laughed again.

“You’re right about this place, Dani. I don’t know if it’s the heat—and God, this heat—or the silence or the tiny little deer that are everywhere, but I love it.” He leaned forward on the handlebars. Sweat-glued blond strands against his face beneath the hat. “I feel like there’s this thing, this stone, that’s moving inside my chest. I always hated sailing. Hated it. Then when I climbed on that rust bucket tub of Casper’s and smelled all that sunscreen and recycled margaritas, I just thought, ‘I can do this.’ I’m going to do this.”

He rocked forward on the bike, nudging her with the wheel. The brim of his hat flopped down as he cocked his head to look at her. “What’s that face? I thought you’d be glad I’m adjusting. Are you worried I’m going to lose my keen fashion sense? Because I assure you, I can rock this T-shirt.”

She wanted to laugh, to assure him she didn’t doubt his fashion sensibilities. She wanted to tell him she was glad he liked it here, but she couldn’t because she wasn’t. If he’d been miserable here, it would be so much easier to tell him.

“Tom found me. He’s here.”

She watched the news sink in. Choo-Choo’s smile dimmed, then dropped, as did his foot from the pedal, making him stagger in place. He stared at her, open-mouthed.

“Where? How did he . . .”

Dani shrugged, not wanting to talk. She knew once she said it out loud, it would be real. “He’s in Room One. The one at the end, just on the other side of the bushes from my shack. He’s there right now. I let him in.”

He stared past her, toward the units, as if expecting to see Tom Booker materialize on demand. “Are you going to do something?”

“Like?”

“Call the police? The state police? Hell, the FBI. Why don’t you tell your boss to tell his Fibbie buddy about him? Tom’s here.” He gave up trying to balance on the bike and stood straddling the bar. “He killed all those people. The FBI has to know, right?”

She nodded, watching the understanding dawn on his face as she spoke. “Yeah, they must know. How could they not? I mean, he’s here. He’s out. He looks great. Not a single fucking scar on him. They patched him up nice and carefully, Choo-Choo. Not like us.”

“Not like us.” He sat back heavily on the bike seat, his hands dropping to his sides. The handlebars spun, the wheel slapping Dani in the leg, but they both ignored it. “They let him out.”

“I don’t think they just let him out. I think they turned him out.” Saying the words aloud fueled something hot inside her. “They fixed him up, made sure he was just fine, and they put him to work. Again. All that shit he told me on the phone about not knowing who hired him that night—maybe he didn’t know then, but he sure as hell knows now.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to run.” It felt right as she said it. “I’ve got almost forty thousand dollars stashed around here, most of it in my car. There’s a tracking device in my car so we’ll have to ditch it once we get to the mainland but—”

“We?”

She gripped the handlebar before her. All those months ago, that lifetime ago when she’d been running for her life in DC, Choo-Choo
could have left her but he didn’t. She’d repaid him by leaving him in that hospital. “He wouldn’t know you by sight.” She tried to laugh. “Especially in that outfit. You could stay. You could just leave on your own.”

Choo-Choo pulled his cell phone from his pocket. “Because it’s worked out so well for me on my own these past few months. Fuck it.” He whipped his arm over his head, sending the phone sailing into the water behind Dani. “Fuck this place. Fuck Tom Booker. And fuck that fucking tracking device. Let’s steal a boat.”