Annie on the Lam: A Christmas Caper (19 page)

When the light changed to green, Joe turned and passed Annie and Nate by. Coleman chuckled again. “I'm the good-looking one in the red hat.”

Joe took a moment to study the older man. “I'm impressed by the way you took charge back at the diner. You didn't used to be a cop, did you?”

“Nope. Fought in the Second World War, though. Nate, too. I learned how to take orders going in, then how to give a few, too, before it was all said and done.” He turned and studied Joe. “How about you? You ever a cop?”

“Yeah, I was.” He cleared his throat. “Guess you're wondering why we're running.”

“Did cross my mind. You said those two cops back there are a couple of rats?”

“Yes, sir. And Annie stirred up their nest.”

“So you helped her out and now you're getting bit, too.”

“You could say that.”

“Don't blame you.” Coleman gave a conspiratorial wink. “If I was younger and single, I'd face an army of rats for a sweet thing like that.”

Joe slanted him a man-to-man look and Coleman laughed heartily. The old guy was perceptive. In the beginning, there'd been a limit to what Joe was willing to risk for Annie. And even that amount of risk had dollar signs attached to it. Her father's dollars.

Not anymore.

He thought of this morning, of making love to her, holding her afterward. The truth had blindsided him. Joe had tried since to rationalize his feelings. But now, with Willis at their heels and Annie's future in the balance, he couldn't pretend. He had fallen in love with her. There wasn't anything he wouldn't do to protect her.

“A man'll do crazy things for a woman. Can't hardly wait to hear what this one has you messed up in.”

“It's a long story.”

Coleman scooted up, peeked over the dash. “It'll wait until we're inside.” He pointed at a small yellow house up ahead. “This is Nate's place. Pull to the back.”

 

T
HEY STAYED
at Nate's until nightfall, though Coleman went home exhausted long before. After meeting Nate's wife, Annie understood why their son Ray was so quiet. Sally Kilroy was a tiny fluttering woman with a tireless tongue. Any kid growing up in her house wouldn't get a word in edgewise.

Late in the day, Sally went to the market to replace the groceries Joe and Annie had left in the trunk of the GTO. They would be driving Sally's old worn-out Buick back to Tess's place. They didn't think it would be safe to return to Joe's car to get the groceries.

While Sally shopped, Nate logged onto his new Dell computer, then pushed out of the chair, offered it to Joe and left the room.

Joe turned to Annie. “You do it. You went to a lot of trouble and risk for this.”

Annie sat and slipped the flash drive into the proper slot. She glanced up at Joe, her fingers poised atop the keyboard. “For all I know, this might turn out to be nothing more than an address book or something else that won't do us any good.”

He shrugged. “Let's take a look and see.”

Annie returned her attention to the computer and pulled up the directory. A list of files labeled by date flashed onto the wide blue screen. She glanced at Joe again, then clicked on the top date of more than a year earlier. After scanning the first two paragraphs of text that pulled up, she scrolled down to read more. “It's a sort of diary. Oh…read this. Look who he mentions.”

“Merry Christmas to us,” Joe murmured, reading over her shoulder, both of them silent as Annie scrolled through the rest of that page then the next. “What do you know….” He exhaled slowly. “I was right about Willis. He
was
skimming dope and money from busts.”

“Why would Harry document this?”

“Maybe to make sure his ass was covered in case they got caught. With detailed records and names, he might've thought he could trade information for a lighter sentence.”

Annie closed the first file then clicked onto the next. The entry was much like the previous one, with dates of deals, amounts exchanged and names of certain people involved.

Joe braced a hand on the desk alongside the keyboard. “You were right on about your boss, Sweet Tea. Willis transferred the dope to Landau, then Landau sold it to his customers and laundered the money through the restaurant.”

“What do you think Willis got out of it?”

“Part of the profit. Landau probably disguised Willis's cut as a payment for services rendered of some sort.”

“But I didn't find anything suspicious when I went through the files.”

“There are a dozen ways to get around it if you know what you're doing. Maybe someone in Willis's family or a friend was in on the deal. The payments could've been made to them under the guise of a business transaction.”

She nodded. “That would be easy enough. Especially if they own a food-service business.” Annie leaned back in the chair. “When we get back to Tess's I'll look at the records again. Maybe now that I have a better idea of what to look for, I'll find it.”

Joe gestured toward the screen. “Let's see the next file and find out what else Harry has to say.”

The chair Annie sat in was oversized to accommodate Nate's large frame. She scooted to one side and patted the seat. “If you don't mind close quarters, I'll share.”

“I think I can handle squeezing up close to you.” He sat slightly sideways, settling his arm around her waist.

Annie brought up the next entry, then read the first few sentences aloud. “Do I understand this? Does it mean Willis wasn't only getting the drugs from raids, he was—”

Joe sat forward abruptly. “He
did
set me up.”

“I'm not sure I understand.”

“Willis checked out two kilos of coke that had been booked into property division after a raid. To take the kilos to court as evidence, supposedly. But the dope never made it back.”

“It went to Harry. I see that, but wouldn't someone have become suspicious when Willis didn't replace it?”

“He replaced it, all right.” Joe met her gaze. “With flour. The kind grandmothers use to bake cakes.”

“And nobody caught on?”

“Yeah, eventually. Shortly before that happened, I'd figured out that some of what we'd confiscated was missing. I was looking into it when everything fell apart. As stupid and cocky as Willis is, he knew better than to sign his own name when he checked out the dope from property division. He falsified police documents so that another officer would be blamed.”

The truth slammed into her. “He signed your name.”

“Only I didn't know it was Willis. I could never figure out who would do that to me.” Traces of the betrayal he'd felt flickered in Joe's eyes. “An inquiry was held, but nothing came of it. The signature didn't match mine, and nobody in property division could verify anything. But it didn't matter. The seed of doubt about me had already been planted in a lot of minds. Especially since it came on the heels of what happened with Emma Billings.”

Annie touched his arm and nodded at the computer screen. “You can clear your name now.”

He smiled. “Thanks to you.”

Annie smiled back, then looked at the screen again. “I don't see anything here about Reno. He's the one I wanted most of all.” Over the past couple of days, she'd come to terms with the fact that she might never know all the facts surrounding that final year of her mother's life, how much Lydia had known about Reno's business dealings, if she was having an affair with him. But the bottom line was that Lydia had been her mother. Annie knew that she not only had to stop making excuses for her mom's failings, she also had to forgive her and move on, remember the good things, as Joe had advised.

But Lydia had paid with her life for whatever sins she'd committed. Annie thought it only fair that Reno paid for his sins, too.

“I doubt we'll find anything here to finger Reno. He's probably the one person Landau's too afraid of to name.” Joe yawned. “I have a feeling if we stayed up all night and read through the rest of these files, we'd find other names. But I'm beat. We'll save the rest for tomorrow. After what we've already seen, I'm satisfied we at least have enough to nail Landau and Willis to the wall. Mark my words, when that happens at least one of them will trade information on Reno for a few less years in the slammer.”

“We should make a copy of this while we're here,” Annie said. “For backup. Just in case.”

“Good idea.” Joe reached for a box of blank disks on Nate's desk shelf.

After
a fitful sleep, Joe awoke just after dawn. So as not to disturb Annie, he lay very still, staring at the ceiling while his sight adjusted to the darkness. Last night, they had hid a copy of the flash drive in the glove compartment of Sally Kilroy's car. Joe thought about the information on it and was bombarded with hurtful memories of the old accusations against him, the inquiry. Now he knew the source of that particular piece of trouble. Willis had tried to ruin him. And he'd come close to succeeding.

They had never been close by any stretch of the imagination. He and Willis had never hung out together, swapped jokes or commiserated over lousy hours and even worse pay. Still, they were cops, members of the same professional family. Joe had always respected the men and women that made up that family.

He drew Annie closer and buried his face in her hair. Her warmth seeped into every fiber of his body, spreading desire and remorse in equal parts through his veins. Maybe he wasn't much better than Willis. In the beginning, he could justify Milford Macy's demand that they keep Annie unaware of his true role. But in the beginning, Joe didn't know and respect her. In the beginning, he didn't love her.

Now no good explanations existed for his continued silence. None had for more than a day. Not since that moment in the back seat of his car when Annie had offered herself to him, and he'd accepted.

As Joe slipped from the bed, he noticed that the telephone on the nightstand was off the hook. Last night, he had been teasing her about something and she'd tossed a pillow at him, knocking the receiver from its cradle. They had never replaced it. Joe put it back now before crossing the room to make a fire.

He took wood from the stack by the fireplace, a match from the mantel above it. Placing the logs onto the grate, he struck a flame and turned on the gas. The wood caught. The flames crackled. Joe returned to bed.

“That's nice,” Annie murmured as he slipped beneath the covers beside her again.

He had hoped she would continue to sleep so that he could think of the best way to tell her the truth about himself. “What's nice? The fire?”

“And you.” She looked up at him with a sleepy smile.

The firelight cast a honeyed glow across her skin and made her eyes sparkle, her pale hair shine. It would've been so simple to put off the truth a while longer, to keep pretending. But he couldn't do it anymore. He wouldn't.

Joe stared down at her, so beautiful in the flickering light, so trusting, so important to him. More important than he'd thought any woman ever would be. He touched her hair, pushed it away from her face.

“Is something wrong?” she whispered, her smile slowly fading.

“No.”

“
Something's
bothering you.”

“I'm in love with you, Annie.”

She brushed her fingers across his cheek, his mouth, her gaze never leaving his. “I'm in love with you, too. I keep telling myself that's crazy considering we've known each other two days.”

“I don't care if it's only been two minutes,” Joe said. “We've shared more and been through more together than a lot of couples do in a lifetime. I love you.”

“And that scares you?”

“It scares the hell out of me. If I lose you—”

“Why would you think that? If it's those files I took that worry you…now that we know about Harry, about Willis…now that we have proof, nobody will blame me for doing what I did.”

He swallowed, looked away, then back at her. “What scares me the most doesn't have anything to do with you stealing those files. There's something I have to tell you. Annie, I—” A noise downstairs interrupted him. Joe shoved the covers aside. “Did you hear that?”

Frowning, Annie pushed up onto her elbows. “I didn't hear anything. What did it sound like?”

“Some kind of movement downstairs.”

“It was probably just the wind rattling the windows.”

“Maybe.” Joe started to lean back again when a sharp shattering sound broke the silence. He jumped up, pulled on his jeans, grabbed his gun from the nightstand and started for the door. “Stay here,” he whispered over his shoulder.

The hallway was dark, the floor cool beneath his bare feet. Joe held the snub-nosed at ready, kept his steps slow, his back to the wall as he moved toward the staircase. Gray morning light sifted up from the wall of windows in the great room below. He took a deep breath then started down, one step at a time, scanning the lower room for any movement.

At the bottom of the stairs, Joe stopped to take inventory and didn't see anything out of place. The front door was closed. He moved to the sofa, around it, taking in everything at once. The space beneath the coffee table, each shadowed empty corner, the distance to the swinging door that led to the kitchen.

A dim shaft of light speared out from beneath that door. Joe halted, drew in a long breath, let it out slowly. In three quick strides, he reached the door, pushed through it, shouted, “Freeze!”

A man with wavy silver hair who looked to be in his late sixties to early seventies stooped in front of the open refrigerator in front of an orange juice puddle and a broken glass. He blinked up at Joe with wide, startled eyes.

Joe wondered what self-respecting burglar took time to drink a glass of juice before heisting the jewels and electronics?

The man slowly stood, lifting his arms overhead while still holding a piece of glass in one hand.

Joe noticed the way his sweater and slacks hung on his tall, toned body, his expensive-looking leather shoes, the Rolex watch on his wrist. The guy didn't look like a thief. He looked like a distinguished gentleman, a mature male model in a Bloomingdale's ad.

And he looked vaguely familiar.

Keeping the gun leveled between the man's patrician eyebrows, Joe snapped, “Who are you?”

“I'm just going to set this glass down,” the older man said, his words slow and precise as he lowered his hand. “Don't shoot me.”

“I asked you a question.”

Before he could respond, the door behind Joe burst open and Annie shrieked, “Daddy!”

Daddy?
Joe glanced back at her.

She switched on the overhead light.

Milford Macy closed the refrigerator door and stepped around the puddle. “I got here as soon as I could, Annie. Thank God you're okay.” He opened his arms and Annie walked over and hugged him.

Tension fell from Joe's body like slats in a lowering window blind. No wonder the guy had looked familiar. Annie resembled her father.

His client
.

A new sort of tension rose up in him again. He stuffed his gun into the waistband of his jeans.

Annie stepped away from her father and turned around. “Daddy, this is Joe Brady. The man I told you about. Joe, my father, Milford Macy.”

They shook hands. “Excuse my language, sir,” Joe said, “But you scared the hell out of me.”

Macy chuckled. “Sorry about that. I tried to call earlier after landing at the airstrip, but the line was busy.”

Joe thought of the phone by the bedside and remembered replacing the receiver just minutes ago.

“Fortunately, another gentleman was out there when I landed. He drove me as far as town and dropped me at a café. A couple of men were drinking coffee there, and I hired them to drive me out here.” He chuckled. “I say I hired them, the driver flew right off the handle when I tried to pay him. Funny old codger. Whistled when he talked.”

“Nate,” Joe and Annie said in unison.

Annie moved up beside Joe. “What are you doing here, Daddy? You know I don't like you to fly alone. Especially in weather like this.”

“The storm is past. The plane was the fastest way for me to get here.” He paused, his gaze shifting from Joe's bare chest to Annie's silky robe then up to her eyes. “I came to take you home.”

“You wasted fuel,” Annie said, and reached for Joe's hand as if for moral support. “I'm not going back to Georgia with you.”

Joe met Macy's stare, watched his eyes narrow, the tips of his ears turn red.
Uh-oh.

“You're wrong,” Macy said to Annie, though his gaze remained on Joe. “I should've come sooner. My daughter wasn't part of our deal, Brady.”

Joe's heart dropped like an anchor as he quickly turned to face Annie.

“Deal?” She looked back and forth between the two men.

“I can explain,” Joe said, his stomach twisting into a knot. “Mr. Macy, could you give me a few minutes alone with Annie before we discuss that? I haven't had a chance to—”

“Discuss what?” Annie's fingers were so cold they shot goose bumps up his arms. She blinked at him. “Joe?”

“I was about to tell you when he showed up. Annie…I'm a private investigator. I—”

“I hired you to watch out for my daughter,” Macy inter rupted, “to bring her home safely,
not
to take advantage of her.”

The color drained from Annie's face. She released Joe's hand and stepped back, her look of betrayal like a knife in his side.

“I can explain,” Joe repeated, reaching for her.

But Annie was through the door before he could speak another word.

 

A
NNIE DARTED UP THE STAIRS
, her vision blurred by tears. She heard Joe call her name, heard her father call out to her, too, but she didn't stop. She had to get away from them. Away from the truth.

The events of the past two days flew back at her. How could she have been so gullible? So stupid? She hadn't met Joe by chance. He hadn't helped her out of the goodness of his heart. Helping her had been his
job
. He was her father's hired watchdog. They had a
deal.

Her father had misled her about Joe, just as he had misled her about her own mother.

Even worse,
Joe
had misled her. Tricked her. He was the lowest of the low. He'd
slept
with her. Told her he
loved
her. Why? To win her trust? Keep her with him until he could deliver her safely to her father and collect his paycheck? He was no different than Lance or the others. Joe didn't want her, he was after her father's money.

At the top of the stairs, Annie headed for the bedroom. Once inside, she slammed the door behind her and twisted the lock. She leaned against the closed door.

“Annie.” Joe rattled the knob. “Annie, please let me in.”

“Go away.” At that moment, she wasn't sure who she hated more, Joe or her father. They had plotted and schemed, and she had made it easy for them by deceiving herself, by believing what they wanted her to believe.

The past was repeating itself.

Hadn't she done that before? Convinced herself that the picture her father painted of her mother was true? That she'd been an angel, a perfect paragon of womanhood Annie should strive to be like? But it turned out her mother had only been human. As Annie was. Prone to mistakes. Easily manipulated and tricked into foolishness.

“Annie,” Joe said, again, his voice low, only inches from her ear. “I made a mistake. Please let me in so we can talk.”

She closed her eyes, covered her mouth with her hand. A mistake. All of it. The time they'd spent together, the words he'd spoken. Yes, she'd fallen in love with him, but hadn't she told him she didn't expect anything?

The lies, though…some of them outright, others by omission…Never confessing about his deal with her father, his job, even after they slept together. The reasons he'd given her for being at the right place when she ran out of Landau's. His declaration of love.

“Annie.” It was her father's voice now on the other side of the door, and he used the same coaxing tone she remembered him using when she was a little girl and he wanted to convince her he knew best. “I never meant for you to find out this way. I didn't plan to tell you at all because I knew you wouldn't understand. But when I saw the two of you together…” His voice sharpened. “If I had known that Brady would stoop to such low methods of winning your trust, I would have never hired him.”

“I wasn't stooping…” Joe exhaled noisily. “That isn't what I was doing.” He sounded miserable.

“Try to see it from my perspective, Annie,” her father continued. “You ran off to New York City just like your mother did. I knew you were angry with me. Then you got a job as a waitress. It didn't make sense. With your work experience, why would you want to wait tables? That's when I started to worry that you were up to something that could get you into trouble with the same people your mother—” His voice faltered. “Reno was in the restaurant business. So can you blame me for checking up on your boss to see if there was any connection?”

“Are you ever going to get it through your head that I'm a grown woman? I don't need or want you to check people out for me.”