Bitter End (Seychelle Sullivan #3) (35 page)

“Seychelle, you stop that right now. Those people are the ones who locked you in there. There was probably nothing you could have done to save them, anyway. You can’t save everyone. You saved yourself, and you saved Zale.”

My breath came in gulping gasps when I tried to talk. I just felt I had to make her understand. “But I’m— always gonna hear—their voices.”

“I know, kid,” she said. “I know.”

XXVIII

When we pulled to the curb on the dark street where I had grown up, I thought Zale was asleep. But before Jeannie even shut off the ignition, the back door slid open and the kid leaped out and ran up the steps and into the house. There was some faint light in the living room windows, and I assumed Molly was burning her candles, standing watch, waiting for her boy to come home. I expected to find her dozing, wrapped in her comforter on the couch, waiting to hear that her boy was safe. At least there was that. At least I could bring her this child and maybe, somehow, whatever had happened between us could finally be finished.

When Jeannie and I walked through the front door, mother and son were still standing in the center of the living room, unmoving, locked in an embrace. When Molly looked up, I saw in her face the fierceness of her love for him and the depth of her gratitude for returning him safe to her arms.

And then I saw something else. Something I didn’t understand. I saw fear.

I had thought it was all over. We were home and we were all safe. I’d let my guard down, and I wasn’t paying attention. So when Janet walked out of the kitchen and started talking, I couldn’t even comprehend at first what I was seeing. She’d asked me a question and I hadn’t heard a word.

“What?” I said.

“What’s the matter with you? Are you some kind of moron? I asked you to bring that fucking case over here. But I’m not asking now. Do it or I’ll shoot the kid.”

I was such an idiot, I hadn’t even seen that she was holding a gun. Again, I noticed that she was speaking in that deep voice of hers. Maybe some men found it sexy, but it was so raspy I found it unsettling to listen to. It was as though this was a different Janet who was speaking.

She was leaning against the doorframe, the gun dangling from her right hand, like an accessory to her outfit of black leather pants, pale blue sweater, and black leather jacket. Her too-red lips posed in a perfect little pout, but no one in the room found the look attractive.

“All right,” I said. “Don’t get excited. I just thought you might want to know what happened to your brother.”

I saw in her eyes that she didn’t know and she wanted to know. But she was afraid of what I was about to tell her. I knew that I could use that.

“He probably called you from the
Mykonos
, right? Yesterday afternoon? He told you he had the kid and he was going to get the kid to tell him where it was. He didn’t know he was sleeping right on top of it. Poor Richard was too stupid to know that case was right under his bunk.” I took a couple of steps to my right, away from Molly and Zale in the center of the living room.

“You shut up and bring me the case.”

“Bet he hasn’t answered his cell phone in the last few hours, though, has he? He’s dead, Janet.”

“I told you to shut up.”
 

I looked at her face. When our eyes met, I saw that the flatness in hers.

“It was Kagan,” I said.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I just kept talking right over her words.

“Kagan and his men came out to the
Mykonos
and shot Richard—”

“That’s not true.”

“So many times his shirt was in bloody tatters.”

“Stop it,” she kept yelling. “Stop it!”

“The last time I saw him, I pushed his body away to drift down Biscayne Bay.”

She stepped away from the kitchen doorframe, closer to Molly and Zale, and raised the gun. She pointed it at Zale. Her voice sounded even deeper and more masculine than it had before as she struggled to get her emotions under control. “I swear I’ll shoot him.”

Zale was hugging the case to his neoprene-covered chest, shaking his head. His glasses glinted in the candlelight.

Molly said, “Zale, honey, it doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, just give it to her.”

He shook his head. “Huh-uhn. It’s Dad’s and she killed him.”

“Shut up!” Janet shouted, and the volume and pitch of her scream made everyone, Molly, Zale, and Jeannie, all take a step back.
 

I attempted to move a little farther away from Molly, increasing the distance between us, making Janet have to choose a target.
 

“You little monster. You and that fucking Pollyanna mother of yours.” Janet waved the gun up and down Molly’s body. “Look at you. What did he ever see in you? You kept calling yourself Mrs. Pontus, acting like
you
were his wife, not me. Kept coming over to the house and bringing that worthless, snotty kid. Kept meeting us at the yacht club after all the brat’s races, and every time he saw you, all Nicky could talk about was ‘Molly this or Zale that,’ ” she said, imitating a whining voice, “until I just wanted to puke. What the fuck did you have on him?”

Molly took a step toward Janet, pushing her son behind her. “The difference was, Janet, I
loved
him. Yeah, the sex with you was good at first, and that was why he left. But when he realized who you really were, that you were empty inside, he wanted out. He told me so not too long before he died.”

I took a couple more steps to my right, circling around Janet, who was so focused on spewing her hatred for Molly and Zale, she didn’t even notice me.

“You liar! Nicky never said no such thing,” Janet screamed.

I wanted to get closer, close enough to use one of the fancy Aikido moves that B. J. had taught me to bat the weapon out of your attacker’s hand. But when I saw the change in Janet’s face, when I saw that perfect porcelain skin pull back into that snarl, teeth bared and the gun coming up, I knew she was going to shoot.

I didn’t even think—I just leaped and tackled her. The gun went off and then clattered to the terrazzo when we landed in a heap next to the coffee table. I couldn’t see if anyone had been hit because Janet and I were on the floor in what can only be described as a real catfight. I was used to fighting my brothers, who punched and kicked and struggled to get me into wrestling holds. And for the past several years I had been participating in the classic artful moves of Aikido fighting on the mats at the dojo. I’d never before fought against someone who bit and scratched and pulled hair and head-butted, all the while screaming at the top of her lungs.

We rolled around on the floor knocking over furniture and breaking lamps. She yanked so hard on my hair that I thought I was going to black out, and then her fingernails dug into my shoulder where the wet suit I was wearing hung too loose. She ripped at my skin. She was trying without much effect to bite me through the wet suit, and then I was doing my best to keep those frigging teeth away from my face. She wrapped her fingers in the gold chain around my neck, tightening it, trying to strangle me until, with a pop, the chain broke and the dolphin charm flew across the floor. That was it. That was when I decided I’d had enough. I saw my opening and went for it.

I pulled back my fist and nailed her jaw with every ounce of weight I could get behind it. We’d just rolled up onto our knees, face to face, and when I punched her, she fell on her side on the terrazzo floor. I crawled on top of her back, straddling her, and pulled her arms back and up until she squeaked a little, so I knew she wasn’t unconscious. I lifted my head fast, trying to flip all the hair out of my eyes to see what was going on in the rest of the room.

“Is everybody okay?” I asked just as Detectives Mabry and Amoretti came through the front door, guns drawn.

XXIX

The cops seemed to outnumber us within a matter of seconds. I climbed off Janet, a uniformed officer got cuffs on her, and she was gone, out the front door of Molly’s house. Thankfully, the one shot Janet fired had merely cut a hole in one of Molly’s original oil paintings on the wall. It turned out that Jeannie, who had been surprisingly quiet while Janet was spitting her vile stuff at us, had actually reached into her pocket under that horse blanket of hers and pushed redial on her cell phone.

“Since Clay was the last one I called—right after you called from Homestead,” she said, “I knew it would dial him.”

“Clay?” I asked.

She looked over at Detective Mabry and stuck her chin out. “That one. Detective Mabry,” but she wasn’t quite able to pull it off without a little smile.

I’m certain I was standing there with my jaw dragging on Molly’s terrazzo floors when Detective Amoretti asked Zale about the case he was holding.

“It was my dad’s. It was on his boat, the
Mykonos
.”

“Well, I guess that means it’s yours now, son. What’s in it?”

“I don’t know.” Zale hugged the case tighter to him.

“Do you want to tell us about what’s happened here?” Mabry asked.

I gave him a grateful look. He understood that we shouldn’t push Zale right now. He’d give up the case when he was ready. Jeannie jumped up and said she’d make some tea, and Molly was walking around her living room, trying to push the furniture back into place. Detective Amoretti took her arm and asked her to sit.

“Do you guys mind if Zale and I clean up a little before we get into this long story? This wet suit is giving me the worst goddamn case of chafe you’ve ever seen.” While Jeannie made the tea, Molly found me an extra-large T-shirt and a pair of overalls she used for painting, and Zale and I retreated to the two bathrooms for a little desalting. When I came out ten minutes later combing my wet hair, Jeannie and Detective Mabry were sitting next to each other on Molly’s dining room chairs chatting and laughing as though they were on a date. Molly and Zale came out of his room, and Detective Amoretti took up his usual position leaning against the wall, watching. A uniformed officer stood by the door, his pad at the ready, taking notes.

Through the front door, I could see the sky growing a pale pink. There were still clouds out there, but they were cumulous now, bulbous and blue, blowing fast across the horizon. The old Florida houses like Molly’s were built without heat or air, and though her parents had installed air conditioning, they’d never added heat. Someone had started a fire in the fireplace, and it was making a big difference in the temperature in the room.

“Have a seat, everybody,” Mabry said. “My partner’s already spoken to Ms. Pontus while you were in the shower and taken her statement as to what occurred here between the time Ms. Black brought her home from the courthouse and when we arrived. Now, Ms. Sullivan, if you please.”

“First, I don’t get it. What was Janet doing here?”

Molly spoke first. “She was really acting crazy when she came to the door. She said she’d searched their whole house. Torn everything apart. She said there was no way it was over there, so it had to be here in my house. She said the cops were looking for her brother, and he wasn’t answering his phone, and somehow all of that had gotten mixed up in her head to mean it was my fault. Everything that was happening to her was my fault, she said. She was just about to have me start tearing my house apart, when you guys showed up.”

“Molly,” I said, “you tried to tell us what a monster Janet was and we didn’t believe you. I’m sorry about that. She was a hell of an actress. Janet played the part of a normal human being so well. She fooled me.”

“Me, too,” Jeannie said. “And not many people manage that.”

So then it was my turn. I had a feeling they already knew what had happened to Richard Hunter and his two crew members, but I told the story and they took their notes. I noticed that Zale no longer had the line tied to his wrist, but he sat with the case on his lap, fingering the keyholes. Some details of the story—details Zale had already heard once and that I didn’t think the kid needed to hear again—I omitted. Maybe it was history that explained who these Hunters were, but I decided to keep my mouth shut about it for now. Besides, I didn’t have the stomach for it. So, I told them how Richard had kept asking us about “it,” and we assumed “it” was in the case, but we really had no idea what “it” was. And I told them how they’d died, that we hadn’t seen or heard anything, and how Zale had sailed us home. When I’d run out of story, everyone turned to Zale.

“Well, son,” Mabry said. “Are you ready to see what it was your daddy wanted you to see?”

Zale nodded and held the case out to Detective Amoretti. He set it on the dining table, produced a set of picklocks out of his pocket, and opened the case in seconds. Amoretti lifted out a simple manila folder and opened it. “Interesting,” he said, handing the open folder to Molly. Zale craned his neck and read over her shoulder.

After a few seconds’ reading, she looked up from the document and stared out through the front windows. “It’s a third will?” she asked.

“Looks like it,” Amoretti said.

Molly flipped to the back of the document. “It’s signed by Nick and witnessed by Leon Quinn. Why wouldn’t he have said anything about this? He never told me.”
 

Mabry motioned for the uniformed officer, and when he came, Mabry spoke at length in his ear. The officer then left through the front door and went out to the car.

“He may be long gone, but we would like to have a talk with Mr. Quinn, it appears.”

“That’s just reminded me of something Richard said yesterday. When he was trying to get Zale to tell him where it was, he said, ‘Nick told Quinn that the kid knew where it was.’ How would Richard know that unless Quinn told him?”

“Or told Janet,” Mabry said. “I think it’s likely Quinn was involved with the boss’s wife. He probably thought
he’d
seduced
her.”

“So you’re saying Nick rewrote his will to make Janet happy, then secretly had Quinn prepare a third will that made the second one null and void?”

“Apparently that was his plan,” Mabry said. “Only Quinn then went and spilled the beans to Janet, setting the gears in motion that resulted in Nick’s murder.”