Beachcomber (8 page)

Gary Freeman, Luke had decided early on in the course of their now three-day-old association, was his boss’s revenge. All the late expense reports, the government-owned car Luke had wrecked and the other one he’d gotten blown up, the informant who’d disappeared with fifty thousand of the government’s cash, obviously still rankled with Tom Boyce. Sticking him with Gary the Geek, as he was known to his fellow agents behind his back for, among other things, his computer expertise, had to be payback. It was the only way Luke could explain it. Right now, despite the heat,
despite the beach, despite the fact that they were trying to run a middle-of-the-night surveillance operation, for God’s sake, Gary was his usual Boy Scout–neat self. Picture Howdy Doody with Coke-bottle glasses and you basically had Gary. At the moment he wore well-pressed khaki slacks, a short-sleeved, button-down blue shirt that was tucked in and belted, polished leather dress shoes and dark socks. He was four years younger than Luke’s own age of thirty-two, four inches shorter at five-nine and probably a good forty pounds lighter.

“Pick up,” Gary mouthed urgently, pointing at his headphones as Luke walked into the bedroom.

Gary’s potentially hair-mussing headphones could only mean one thing. Well, two, actually. One, the bug Luke had installed in Christy Petrino’s phone actually worked. Two, she had a call.

A glance at the clock told him that it was twenty-two minutes past three
A.M.
Unless it was a telemarketer with a death wish, this call almost had to have something to do with her recent jaunt to the Crosswinds Hotel. Yee-ha. They were in business.

Sitting on the corner of the bed, he took the headphones Gary passed him and put them on.

“… the hell did you do?” A voice squawked in his ear. The speaker was a man. Adult, blue-collar Jersey accent. Angry tone.

“Who is this?” There was a kind of wobble in Christy’s voice. Was she scared? Yes, of course she was scared, Luke answered himself, deliberately clamping down on the quick spurt of concern he felt for her. She
was many things, but she hadn’t struck him as a fool, and she’d have to be a fool
not
to be scared now that she was swimming with the sharks.

The man continued in the same belligerent tone: “You don’t worry about that. You worry about this. You go gettin’ the cops involved, and we’re not gonna be friends no more, understand?”

“I couldn’t help it! A woman was killed. Tonight on the beach. That’s why the cops were there. It didn’t have anything to do with—the briefcase.” She practically whispered the last two words, then paused, breathing so hard that Luke could hear it through the phone. Then her voice altered, grew stronger, indignant even. “Are you
watching
me?”

“Fuckin’-A, baby. Every move you make. Maybe you should want to remember that.”

“I did what I was told.”

A grunt. “Maybe. Except for you got the damned cops involved. That ain’t the way we like it to go down, just so you know.”

A beat passed.

“Is Uncle—is Vince there? Can I speak to him?”

A bark of unpleasant laughter. “Nah, Vince ain’t here. Now you pay attention. Tomorrow you’re gonna go visit the lighthouse. Around two. Make like a tourist. Somebody will get in touch. Understand?”

“No! No, I don’t understand. I was only supposed to deliver the briefcase, and—”

“Be there.” There was an unmistakable undertone of threat to that. Then the connection was broken as the man hung up.

Luke heard a sound that made him think Christy had sucked in her breath. Then she, too, hung up. He listened to the line go dead, then looked at Gary.

“We get a fix on that?”

Gary glanced at the computer screen in front of him. “Got a number.” He hit a few keys, made a face. “One of those damned disposable cell phones. Not enough time to get a location fix. Sorry.”

“Shit. Whoever it is, he’s got to be fairly close by. How else would he know about what went down on the beach?”

Gary shrugged.

Luke pulled off the earphones, stood up, and moved past Gary to punch a button on the monitor, which, like the laptop Gary had been using, was set up on the small vanity. The vanity was cheap white wicker and flimsy, part of a matching suite that, like the rest of the furniture, had come with the rented house. The monitor flickered to life. Christy’s kitchen and part of her living room appeared on the screen. The two cottages were nearly identical, fully furnished rentals with a combination kitchen/dining/living area, three minuscule bedrooms, two baths. She wasn’t visible. He punched another button, and the tiny camera he’d installed at the same time as he’d bugged the phone panned the area. Ah, there she was. He hit the button and the camera stopped.

“She doesn’t look too happy,” Gary observed and then straightened the bedspread that Luke had mussed by sitting on it.

“She’s got reason.” Luke eyed the high-resolution
image almost grimly. He’d concealed the camera in the clock above the refrigerator. She was standing in profile to it, head bent, facing the counter where the phone she’d just hung up rested. Rich brown hair fell forward over her face, veiling her features, but her body language spoke volumes. Her arms were crossed over her chest. The slender shoulders that had felt disturbingly fragile beneath his hands were slumped. She was breathing hard, visibly agitated. With that loose green dress hanging down to her ankles, she looked feminine, delicate, vulnerable.

Luke clamped down hard on another of those unwelcome spurts of concern. However downcast she looked, she was no innocent victim: her background was mob through and through. He’d done his homework: her dad Joseph had been a small-time hoodlum until he’d been shot dead in his own driveway when Christy was nine. Her mother Carmen worked in a cigarette factory and was mobster Vincent Amori’s longtime girlfriend. Twenty-four-year-old-sister Nicole was newly divorced from a hard luck wiseguy named Franky Hill and, with three kids under five, was basically a production line for a whole new generation of Future Mobsters of America. Twenty-one-year-old-sister Angela worked in a department store, ran with a tough crowd, and was a big-time party girl. Christy, a hard worker who had put herself through college and law school, came off at first look like the cuckoo in the nest. From everything he could discover, she’d kept her nose clean until she’d gotten involved with Donnie Jr., which was the Bureau’s code name for Michael DePalma,
both because he looked kind of like Donny Osmond on a real bad hair day and because he was the son of Don John DePalma. Christy had been on the Bureau’s radar screen since she’d gone to work for Michael DePalma’s law firm two years ago. At first Luke hadn’t paid all that much attention to her. Then, as she’d started bedding the boss, he’d kept a closer eye on her. Now that Michael had flown the coop, Luke was convinced that she was the key to bringing him down.

The only problem was, he was starting to worry about her. And it didn’t take a genius to figure out why. What was clouding his judgment on this issue was that she was a …

“Pretty woman,” Gary steepled his hands beneath his chin and put into words exactly what Luke had been thinking.

“Yeah,” Luke agreed, definitely not wanting to go there with Gary. “So what happened to the briefcase? Tell me it’s somewhere you know it’s going to stay put for a while.”

Grimacing, Gary met his gaze. Without his brand-new partner having to utter so much as a word, Luke knew the score. He felt his blood pressure skyrocket. He’d already made the acquaintance of that expression—and it meant the news was not anything he wanted to hear.

“I lost it.”

“You lost it?” By the skin of his teeth, Luke managed to keep his voice even. Fixing Gary with a narrow-eyed gaze that fell just short of being a glare, he fought for
calm.
Ohhmm,
he thought, reaching deep down inside himself in search of the inner serenity he’d been assured was at his center in the yoga classes he’d recently attended as part of another surveillance effort. “How the—how could you lose it?”

“Well, see, you know how I was supposed to give you a heads-up when our girlfriend there started heading back home, then stay put and keep a lookout on the briefcase until you relieved me?”

Luke nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He was trying, but the on-ramp to the nirvana highway remained maddeningly out of reach.

“She delivered the briefcase, all right, put it in the gray Maxima just like she was told, then started walking back down the beach. As soon as she got out of sight I started to give you a holler, but the damned transmitter wouldn’t work. It was dead as a doornail. I was afraid she was going to catch you in her house, but I didn’t want to leave my post, so I didn’t know what to do. I figured that the problem with the transmitter was probably dead batteries, but that didn’t really help because I didn’t have any fresh ones. Then I remembered I had a penlight in my pocket. Took Triple A, just like the transmitter. There was nobody in the car, the parking lot was dead, nothing happening anywhere. So I nipped into the men’s room by the pool because it was the only place nearby that had lights and privacy, and I changed the batteries. I was only in there for a minute, I swear, and I didn’t hear crap, but when I got back the car—was—gone.” His voice faltered at the end, probably in response to Luke’s expression.

“Gone?” Luke was starting to feel like a frigging parrot, but the enormity of the screwup was such that there were no words to do it justice. He’d checked the briefcase on one of his trips inside Christy’s cottage. Catalogued and photographed its contents, from which he’d learned exactly nothing. The damned thing, which he’d expected to be full of money meant for Donnie Jr., was filled with old newspapers instead. Which meant, unless and until he was able to discern the significance of the newspapers, he still didn’t have a clue as to exactly what was going down here. The next step, of course, was to follow the briefcase, see who picked it up—he couldn’t get lucky enough to have it be Donnie Jr. himself—and where it went after that. Now they’d lost track of the briefcase.

“Yeah, gone. Poof. Just like that. Empty parking space.”

Luke searched for his center again, but came up empty. Tranquillity Central might be in there somewhere, but he wasn’t finding it. Or feeling it.

“So what did you do?” he asked carefully.

“First I thought—
shit.
Then I thought I better tell you. So I tried the transmitter again. Nada. The damned thing still didn’t work. Then I realized that our girlfriend was going to get home soon and you still didn’t know she was coming, so I started running down the beach—not the beach, exactly, but the path between the houses and the dunes—staying low because I didn’t want our girlfriend to see me. The whole time I kept trying to see if I couldn’t get the transmitter to work. Finally I smacked the damned thing and,
boom, there it was, working. About that time our girlfriend started screaming and running up over the dunes. I sang out to you and hit the sand. She never even saw me.”

Gary said that last part as if he expected congratulations. Luke fought off a vivid mental image of Ozzy Osbourne on stage biting off the head of a bat. Only Ozzy was wearing Luke’s face, and Gary was the bat.

Abandoning the search for his center as a lost cause, Luke cast a cursory glance at the monitor—Christy was turning away from the counter, walking across the living room, switching on lamps—and let loose with a soft but heartfelt string of curses.

“It wasn’t my fault!” Gary protested. “How did I know somebody was going to drive away in the car? The place was dead. There wasn’t a soul around. The
ferries
are closed for the night. Where could anybody go? What were the chances?”

Luke swallowed several possible replies to focus on the big picture.

“You get the license plate number?” Already heading out of the room, Luke threw the question back over his shoulder.

“Yes, of course I got it.” Gary pressed a key on the computer and rattled off the number. “What do you think, I’m an idiot or something?”

Clearly intended as a rhetorical question, that was probably best left unanswered, Luke decided.

“So?”

“The plate was reported stolen a month ago in Asheville.” Standing in the bedroom doorway now,
Gary watched as Luke jerked open the door that led from the kitchen to the garage. “Where are you going?”

“To look around, see if I can spot the car. Hell, this is an island. The ferries are closed for the night, like you said. Where could anybody go? You keep an eye on the monitor.”

“Yeah, okay, but …”

Whatever followed that “but,” Luke missed it. The door between the house and the garage was already closing behind him. He was driving a two-year-old Ford Explorer that belonged to the Bureau, and he backed it out of the garage and pulled onto the narrow road with careful speed. The rescue vehicles were gone now, and except for a few porch lights this part of the island was dark as a hole.

The way things were going, he was starting to feel like one of the Keystone Kops, Luke reflected savagely. His headlights speared a startled possum that froze for a second before scampering to safety in a stand of loblolly pines beside the road. Murphy’s Law definitely applied to this case: Anything that could go wrong pretty much had. Agents tracking organized crime used to command the best of everything: hot cars, hot gadgets, and hot chicks. Now investigations like this were the Rodney Dangerfield of law enforcement: They got no respect. Preoccupied with the war on terrorism, the Bureau had parked home-grown enemies like the mob at the rear of the lot. Still, a low-level eye had been kept on the usual suspects, and enough information had been gathered to wangle an indictment against Donnie Jr. When he’d flown the coop, Luke had been
called in. The fact that Luke had been enjoying the first week of a well-deserved three-week vacation hadn’t mattered, either to Tom Boyce or himself. What had mattered was that he was way familiar with the players. In his first years with the Bureau’s Philadelphia office he’d tracked them exclusively. Since then, he’d also had to focus on a variety of higher-priority cases, but his determination to bring down DePalma, his father, his friends, and associates had never waned.