Cooler Than Blood (22 page)

CHAPTER 36

I
t was a little before one when Garrett and I spotted Joseph Dangelo as he strolled out of Long Sally’s. My buddy, Baby Carrot, who knew “Lewis Carroll” was a pseudonym for Charles Dodgson, got in the driver’s seat of a black SUV. I thought of pen names and heard McGlashan’s voice in my head:
Goes by the name of Eric Rutledge
. At the time, I had thought it was an unusual, but not uncommon, way to give someone’s name. A style of speech. But McGlashan, who hadn’t called me back, was a straight shooter. He had shifted his weight after he had given Rutledge’s name. Did Rutledge go by a different name?

Garrett and I had dispatched Morgan on his Harley to Dangelo’s place at Ybor City, as we didn’t know which location he would pop in at. I texted him and let him know we had him. As I followed a block behind Dangelo’s car, I hit Binelli’s number again. She picked up, which I wasn’t expecting. I told her to stick with Rutledge but to open it up to different first names.

“There aren’t many variations,” she said. “Erik with a ‘k,’ but that’s about it.”

“Erich,” I said, spelling it out for her. “But it’s German, and Rutledge is English, specifically northern England.”

“Right. And you think he’d be true to his genealogical roots?”

“I haven’t a clue. Middle initial is ‘W.’ Maybe you can run with that.” I switched gears. “Have you given more thought to my proposal?” I was eager to solidify her as a permanent asset. I didn’t like her uncertainty, which accompanied every conversation. Her hesitancy was a weak link. This is a business where everyone has to be on board, and you need to be 100 percent right, even when you’re wrong. I didn’t know why Binelli was afraid to commit. Fear of job repercussions? Moral ambiguities? Maybe she was considering bidding adios to the bureau and teaching inner-city junior high. If so, she was qualified—she carried two guns every day.

She asked, “Have you answered
my
question yet?”

“Which question?” I asked, although I knew what she was referring to.

“You know.”

“I don’t know.”

It was a lie and a double answer; it could serve as a claim that I didn’t know what question she referred to, or a direct response to the question we both knew I perfectly understood. She hung up. I felt cheap, like I’d been discovered to be a fraud and let down those who mattered most. I wouldn’t dodge her again; I wouldn’t dodge myself again.

Dangelo’s car rolled up to a valet stand for a restaurant on Beach Drive. I swung the truck into the next side street. Garrett and I decided it would be best if I flew solo. It would be less threatening.

Dangelo sat at a back table along with a goateed man. I wondered where Tweedledum’s twin was, but thought two bodyguards was overkill in the first place. They watched as I approached.

“This place used to have standards,” I said as I stood over them. A waitress with a shirt that wanted to pop its buttons dropped by and inquired if I would be joining them.

“Yes,” Dangelo answered, “he will be.” He turned to Tweedledum. “Let us have some time, Chuck.”

Chuck stood, brought his face into mine—his eyebrows needed to be trimmed—held that pose for a beat, and said, “‘This place used to have standards?’ That old horn’s the best you can blow? I had higher expectations for you.” He sauntered over to the bar, and I claimed his seat. It was warm. I wanted to pick it up and break it over his head.

I turned my attention to Dangelo. “His last name wouldn’t be Dodgson by chance, would it?”

“No. It’s Duke. Chuck Duke.” Dangelo gave me a quizzical look. “Why do you ask?”

“He go to college?”

Dangelo chuckled. It was a pleasant sound. He was a hard man not to like. “I see you’ve had the opportunity to talk with him. Mr. Duke carries unusual mental capacity.”

“Yet he’s a goon for you,” I said. I thought of PC and decided to redouble my efforts to steer him away from the street life.

“He has a myriad of responsibilities within our organization,” Dangelo said, “and the only person who has shown tendencies of being a goon, Jacob”—he rubbed his neck—“is, I’m afraid, you.”

“How’s the bar business these days?”

Dangelo landed a hard stare that would register a point in a boxing match. He brought his hand down from his neck and placed both hands evenly in front of him on the table. He said, “You took the girl. I want my money.”

“I have neither.”

“You took her.”

“I did not.”

“You know where she is.”

“I do not.”

“You’re lying.”

“I am not.”

He tossed his hands up in disgust and glanced away from me and out toward the restaurant. He came back to me. I doubted it had been an inside job. I’d made Rutledge out for swiping Jenny, but I still needed to eliminate the possibility of a coup within his organization. I went in strong, as if I already knew. “It’s one of your men. Someone’s trying to work you and—”

“Give it up,” he punched out. “Why do I have to keep
telling
you that? You took her.”

“No. Why do
I
have to keep telling
you
that?”

Neither of us spoke for a moment. My phone vibrated in my pocket. Next to us, a young man in a blue suit opened a leather briefcase and spread loose documents on the table. His companion, an older man in a short-sleeve shirt, gave the pile a bored glance. He reserved his real interest for the waitress—specifically her stressed buttons.

Dangelo asked, “Who is the
third
party who
has
the girl who
leads
to my money?” The words tumbled out like a poetry reading.

The waitress placed a glass of water in front of me. They needed a new dishwasher. The glass had the faint outline of a woman’s lips on it. I picked it up—lip marks away from mine—and took a sip. An ice cube slipped into my mouth. I placed the glass back on the white tablecloth and leaned back in the chair. I like sipping on ice. It gives my mouth something to do when I’m not talking.

“You know, don’t you?” Dangelo asked.

“You’re not privy to that at this time. I just dropped by to inform you that it wasn’t me who waltzed out of the Winking Lizard last night with Jenny.” I planned on playing all my cards, but not yet.

“You knew she was there—you
were
there—yet you deny taking her. What more do you require of me? Join the Flat Earth Society?”

“I don’t care if you sit on a roof and wait for Jesus. I batted cleanup. Someone beat me to her. Someone, as you know, who had a front-door key or was already inside the bar.”

“The back door?”

“Send me a bill.” My phone buzzed my thigh again.

“It looks like you took a battering ram to it. It’s not even salvageable.”

“Imagine that.”

“But the front door was unlocked.”

“Baffles me too,” I said.

He leaned in. “It wasn’t locked when you were there?”

“You’re a fast one.” I crunched the ice and put my elbows on the table. “I think someone stayed in after closing hours. Maybe in the head. Wandered in late in the evening and hung out until the place was empty.”

Dangelo’s eyes glazed past me as if he, too, were deciding which cards to play and when to show them. He said, “We concur. Can you give me a description? I can see if anyone remembers such a man.”

“You’ve got a security camera.”

“We reviewed it. Unfortunately, it’s focused on the cash register, not the restrooms.”

I decided to go all in. Jenny, as far as I could ascertain, was alive despite having been kidnapped three times. Her luck had to be close to quitting time. “Someone owes Vegas a bundle of money,” I said. “But instead of paying his debt, he decided to keep it himself. He needs to silence Jenny to bury the money trail.”

“Our organization has extensive interests in Vegas—”

“I imagine so.” I realized I had cut him off.

“And Mr. Duke performs a wide variety of work for us.”

“So you said.”

He held my gaze for a moment. “He discovered an unusual connection between the missing girl and my missing funds. It wasn’t at all that obvious.”

Did Dangelo or his organization know Rutledge? I could have stared at the board all day and not seen that coming.

“I believe you stated,” I said, “that you don’t believe in coincidences.”

“Yes.” The right side of his mustache curled up; I’d not seen that before with him. “It bodes well for a man if he’s a good listener.”

“It bodes well if we stop our prancing. Let me guess. Someone she came in contact with is an individual you extended unsecured credit to.”

Dangelo settled back into his chair. “We believe that to be the case.”

“Eric Rutledge,” I said. He tried not to flinch, but his jaw clenched, and I hadn’t seen that before either. Uncle Joe was in the cooker. “When did you make the connection?”

“He was good,” Dangelo replied. “He avoided the security camera at the Winking Lizard. But Eugene, when we showed him a picture, remembered him loitering before closing time. You see”—he dismissed the waitress with a wave of his hand when she was still six feet out—“we just connected the dots this morning.”

“We’re on parallel tracks. How did you get here?”

Dangelo waited a beat then came in. “Mr. Duke was conducting some idle research on the girl’s—Ms. Spencer’s—encounter with the sheriff’s office. He recognized…he uncovered the name of someone who owed us some money.”

“But you accused me.”

“Covering my bases, much like you.”

“You had his picture?”

“Such people, who owe us a considerable sum, are known throughout the organization.”

“Duke trips over the connection. You flash a picture to Eugene; he confirms that Rutledge was in the bar, but now he’s gone.”

“Yes, although you’re eliding one item that baffles us. Why was Eric Rutledge stowed away in my bar? Why that bar, Jacob? Who led him there?”

I blew my breath out. Lying wouldn’t advance my cause. “I might have slipped up a bit, Joe.”

A laugh escaped him. “Forgive my humorous response, but such a lighthearted admission seems so…unbecoming of you.”

I shrugged. “I’m not a virgin.”

“No,” he said with a chuckle, “I suppose none of us is.” I’m glad he found the thing so damn amusing. “Strange, isn’t it?” he wondered. “A man you trusted is now the man you chase, but here you and I sit working through our issues in a civilized manner.”

“Speaking of which,” I said, “Rutledge creates an unusual challenge for you. He wears a badge, and you can’t go in and manhandle him the way you normally operate. You can’t afford to have ‘cop killer’ on your résumé.”

“Such talk. He reached in and took a drink of water. He placed it back on the table. “But since you opened the binder, I’ll remind you that your résumé is, as I’ve already stated, remarkably stark. Yet you hardly seem a man of inaction.”

“What’s in it for me?”

“The woman you so—”

“Your turn to be careful. ‘
Very
careful’ is, I believe, how you put it.” Our eyes were locked in a death grip. Dangelo nodded his head up and down; I tilted forward. “Measure your words, Joe. This ain’t no dress rehearsal.”

“Well…” He took a breath and sat forward. “Ms. Spencer and—”

“Keep it simple.”

He let his breath out evenly and said in a measured voice, “We would have no interest in you, your associates, or your friends, past or present. Frankly, Jacob, we would be in your debt.”

Dangelo was offering a peace treaty that he wouldn’t delve into Kathleen’s past. I had to assume at that point that he was suspicious that Kathleen was the former Lauren Cunningham whose husband had been murdered days before he was to testify against the Outfit, Dangelo’s association. He also likely surmised I was responsible for the deaths of four of his men who had been sent to silence her. Furthermore, he seemed to realize that his organization, as I knew,
had
overreacted when they sent the four men after her.

“Do we have an agreement?” he asked.

“And if I’m unable to find the money or Rutledge?”

“I have great faith in you. But in that unlikely event, I’ll consider the mere act of your effort to seal our agreement. How did that Native American put it? ‘I will fight no more forever.’”

“A good omen.”

“How so?”

“His name was Chief Joseph.”

Dangelo smiled, but it seemed to take something out of him. I stood, took a step toward him, and said, “You’re in debt to me now. You just don’t know it.” I didn’t wait for a reply.

On the way out, I paused in front of Chuck Duke. “What do you think?” I asked him. “Pedophile or not?”

“Dodgson?”

I nodded.

“No doubt. He would have done well with an organization like ours.”

CHAPTER 37

I
hit the front door and smacked into a morning deluge. I wanted to check my phone, so I ducked into a real estate office next to the restaurant. I told the receptionist, a substantial lady with a doughnut in her hand, that I was seeking refuge from the rain. She smiled, placed her pastry on her mouse pad, and handed me a sticky card. Toni Shaffer, she said, wasn’t in at the moment. Refuge seeker or not, I was a potential client.

I checked my calls and punched Binelli’s number. She picked up on the second ring.

“Talk to me,” I said.

“I found your man.”

“And?”

“Wallace Eric Rutledge.”

“No wonder he went with ‘Eric.’ Now tell me why’s he in your database.”

“We keep a file on law enforcement personnel with gambling issues. A study a year ago showed they were the most susceptible to crossing the line. His name is on the list. Declared bankruptcy twice and has jumped around. Lee County is his third stop in seven years. But his record is clean, except for one incident. Gun—”

“What was that?” I realized she was going to tell me, but I’d jumped in with my question.

“Gunned down a suspect during a drug raid. Went in himself. Some money was never recovered. There was an investigation, and he was cleared. But judging by the length of the investigation, it wasn’t exactly open-and-shut.”

“Did you look into it?”

“The drug raid?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure, I read the seven hundred pages while soaking in the tub this morning. We’re talking CliffsNotes. Got it?”

“He owes money to Dangelo.”

“Come at me again.”

“Just met with Uncle Joe. He claims Rutledge owes their Vegas branch.”

“My, oh my, oh my. What a tiny little world we live in. The Nevada guys are above Dangelo’s pay grade. The heat must be on him.”

I thought of his facial twitches and wondered just what type of conversations Dangelo was having with the pay grade above him. “Any known addresses? Family? Anything else you can give me?” I asked.

“Divorced twice, no kids.”

“Address?”

“No longer in your neck of the woods, although he grew up just south of you. Only parcel under his name now is in Lee County.”

I was disappointed at that. I was hoping Rutledge still owned property around Tampa Bay. It would have been a convenient place to stash Jenny and the cash. No way would he use his personal residence.

“Heavy gambler?” I asked. It was a moot question. I was stalling as, in the back of my mind, I was formulating my final assault on Binelli.

“An addict. Remember, you didn’t get any of this from me.”

“Any record of Vegas debt?” Still stalling.

“No, not that he doesn’t have Vegas debt. We just have no way of knowing that.”

It was now or never. “Can I put your picture on the team website?”

“You work for a shadow agency, right? Some well-financed rogue branch?” It sounded rehearsed. She had made up her mind based on what I would say. FBI Special Agent Natalie Binelli and I were going to settle this here and now.

“At times. Certainly not on this case, which is why I’ve been badgering you. I get into situations where I need another source, where I need help. I can’t always go to my agency, and even when I can, it’s often not enough—like at Escobar’s when we freed those girls.”

“What’s the problem?”

“The problem? The problem, Vassar, is I never know whether you’re all in. I sense that any phone call could be our last, and I can’t have that. I need to know.”

The line was quiet, and the receptionist switched her doughnut to her other hand. She picked up a call. I pressed my phone hard against my ear.

“You know what I want,” Binelli said.

“How much?”

“Oh, no, cowboy. You’re not even in the right playing field, and you know it. That stupid comment just got you two strikes. One more, and I hang up.”

“You need to be crystal clear.”

“And so do you. The truth. Would you have?” She laid it out. “Would you have busted my wrist that night in Escobar’s kitchen if I hadn’t gone along with your half-brained scheme to save those girls?”

“Without hesitation.”

“
Busted
my wrist to get your pissant way.”

“Yes, ma’am. I didn’t think you’d let me, and I’m glad you didn’t. But lives were in danger. Before we closed, one man was missing his head, one had bled out on the living room floor, one was floating facedown in the bay, and Elvis had lost half his blood. That’s not an uncommon scene for—”

“I’ll play with you.”

It took a second to register. “Understand what I’m saying?”

“Crystal,” Binelli threw back at me. “I just wanted to make sure you could tell me, and yourself, the truth before joining your little Sunday school group. If I ever reach the point where it’s our last conversation, I’ll let you know; I’ll finish whatever deal we’re on then shut the door. Agreed?”

“Fair enough.”

“And Jake?”

“Yeah?” I don’t believe she had ever addressed me by my name.

“Those other times I asked you, and you said you didn’t know?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t ever lie to me again.” The line went dead.

“Okay.”

I turned to thank the receptionist for offering me sanctuary. She had dropped her phone and doughnut and was staring at me. “Not
that
Elvis,” I said.

The rain had stopped. I stepped onto the steamy pavement and instantly jumped back up against the building as two female joggers brushed past me. Both were drenched in sweat and rain. I held eye contact long enough with the one wearing the Rays visor to count as sex. I found Garrett leaning against my truck.

“Why the smirk?” he asked, as I climbed behind the wheel. He went around to the passenger’s side.

“Binelli. We’ve reached terms of an agreement.”

“What sealed the deal?”

“I told the truth.”

He grunted, and I recounted my conversation with her.

My energy surge created by Binelli’s information dissipated like a fog lifting off the water. I
thought
I had reached an agreement with Dangelo that if I found—meaning turned over to him—his money, not only would he not look into Kathleen’s past, but I also might be in a position to call in a favor one day. Even if I came up empty-handed, I didn’t think he was a threat to Kathleen.
I’ll consider the mere act of your effort to seal our agreement.
He had nothing to gain by going after her and had already indicated his associates realized she wasn’t a threat, and they, like me, had overplayed their hand. In full disclosure, they
did
end up dead, and I was whistling “Dixie,” but I was willing to let minor imbalances slide.

What Dangelo didn’t know was that while he had talked, my mind had flashed to Kathleen’s hardwood floor.
Words ring so hallow
.
I wouldn’t take a chance. At the end of the road, Dangelo would understand in perfect terms why he would volunteer for a slow death before any harm ever befell Kathleen. “Do we have an agreement?” he had asked.

I hadn’t answered.

And Jenny? I was getting close; I knew it. One break. One tip, and she was mine. I needed her. For herself. For Susan. To keep Kathleen’s past where it belonged. To keep myself from losing.