Finding Harmony (Katie & Annalise Book 3) (15 page)

“Is that one of them?” I whispered.

“Yes. Get down,” Collin said. “I don’t see the other guy, and he could be watching us from a different direction.”

I flattened my upper body. “Why not you guys, too?” I asked. “I don’t think you’ll see the other one.”

“I’m the new guy. They’re not as likely to recognize me. They’re looking for two men and a woman, or for a man and a woman. Definitely not for two men. Maybe they’ll recognize Kurt, maybe not, but let’s give this a try.”

The van cruised past the men and Kurt kept his face averted. Collin played it cool, pretending to scroll through messages on his phone, but actually watching them from behind his sunglasses.

“Why don’t you think we’ll see the other one?” Collin asked.

“Because thanks to Dad, I think I knocked him out with a side kick.”

“No shit?” Collin asked.

I noticed that something felt breezy around my crotch. I looked down, then reached tentatively for the seam of my capris. Yep, split.

“No shit,” I said. “Which is why I’ll need to change these pants into something a little less revealing.”

Kurt spoke. “You kicked one of the guys and knocked him unconscious?”

I started to answer, but Collin got there first. “Katie was the Karate Kid when she was younger. State champion at the age of twelve. She was something else.”

Kurt nodded, surprised. “Huh,” he said. Respectful.

I changed the subject slightly. “Do you think the guy saw us?” I asked.

“I don’t think so. But even if he didn’t, this won’t fool him for long, if he’s any good. As soon as he realizes we aren’t in our room, he’ll head to the airport. Guaranteed.”

“And his buddy won’t be out forever,” I added.

The van turned onto the main road. I counted slowly to twenty and then sat up. The driver had acted as if my behavior was totally normal.

I whispered close to Collin’s ear. “Our driver is acting funny.”

“Yeah,” he said. “He’s sensing a profitable opportunity, I think.”

“Could he go back and rat us out?”

“I’d bet you anything he would.”

“We could pay him enough to ensure he sticks around the airport.”

“I like your thinking,” he said.

Collin negotiated a deal with the driver to wait for us, making up a story about one of us needing to return to the hotel. While they talked, I checked my phone. Ah, the message from earlier. A text from Julie. Or rather, several texts.

“I reached Nick’s friend Bill, and we made an executive decision. He is in San Juan. He wants to help, and he swore he could have you to Mona faster than anyone out of Rincón could. He wants to pick you up from the airport there and take you straight to his boat. You can sleep on the boat instead of in a hotel. I said yes and booked you tickets.” She gave the flight information and e-ticket confirmation numbers.

I felt a twinge of dread that faded fast. I used to get seasick, but since I’d had the twins, it had gone away. Thank God. I texted back. “Sounds good. Thank you.”

“Change of plans, guys,” I said.

Kurt made a sound like “hruh.” I took that to mean, “Please tell me about the change in plans, Katie.”

“Julie booked us tickets to San Juan. We’re catching a fast boat out of there tonight with Nick’s high school friend who captains the
Wild Irish Kate.
” I had already told them about
Kate
earlier.

“Are you sure? Will that get us there fastest?” Collin asked.

“Julie said she quizzed him, and he convinced her that it was our best option. I trust him.” And this is what Nick said to do. Sort of.

“Sounds like as good a plan as any,” Collin said.

Kurt looked squinty-eyed, but he finally nodded.
There you go, Kurt.

“I’ll call and cancel our Mayagüez tickets,” I said.

“Hold off,” Collin replied. “Let’s leave it out there as a red herring.”

“What?”

“A false clue. In case they’re monitoring credit cards to figure out where we’ve gone.”

Ah. How had I lived to thirty-seven years of age and not had “red herring” in my vocabulary?

“Maybe we should all get as much cash as our debit cards will allow while we’re still where the bad guys expect us to be, so we can stay off the credit cards for the rest of the trip?”

“Wow, sis, that’s a halfway decent idea.”

“I’m smarter than I look. I was also thinking that tiny towns in Puerto Rico may not be the best place to use credit cards, anyway.”

“Cash makes for fast transactions, too,” Collin said.

The van pulled to the curb outside our terminal, except it wasn’t our terminal anymore.

“American Airlines, please,” I said.

“I thought he say Cape Air?” the driver asked, pointing at Collin with his head.

“Our mistake. American Airlines,” Collin said.

The van’s tires squealed.

Wild Irish Kate
,
here we come.

The wheels of our plane touched down with a thump at San Juan’s Edward Munoz International Airport at 9:15 p.m., right on time. It had been a turbulent approach. My hands hurt. I looked at my palms and saw red stripes. Apparently, I’d had a death clutch on the armrests.

Fifteen minutes and one shuttle ride later, we entered the San Juan airport, carry-ons in hand. The message buzz sounded from my iPhone.

“Bill will meet you at baggage claim,” Julie texted.

I replied. “Thanks.” I had never seen Bill before, and I hoped Julie had given him a description of us. Exhaustion weighed me down. I felt the heaviness under my eyes that meant big black circles. I was sure they would match the dark spots that had multiplied all over my white blouse, which was now paired with blue jean shorts with an intact crotch seam. I swiped my lank hair back from my forehead and my hand came away greasy. I hoped the boat would have a shower.

After nearly three years in and out of here from St. Marcos, I knew the San Juan airport as well as I knew my children’s faces. Kurt and Collin surfed my wake as I powered ahead, Kurt on autopilot but Collin on full alert. Collin had assured us that we’d shaken our followers in Punta Cana, and no one on the plane had looked anything like them or shown any interest in us. But Collin said not to get our hopes up that we were free of them yet.

“They’ll have nearly an hour while we’re in the air. It wouldn’t take much for them to figure out we flew to San Juan. Hell, if they play the odds they’ll know we have to fly through here to connect to anywhere else. With just a phone call they can arrange for hired help to greet us in Puerto Rico, even on speculation,” he said.

How lovely. I wondered if they’d make that call for hired help from Mexico or St. Marcos. I remembered Jiménez’s behavior toward our investigation. I was still suspicious he was involved with the cartel.

I was glad Collin warned us, though. He had made a huge difference already. I led them through the revolving glass doors into baggage claim. It was wall-to-wall as usual, humans crowded up to the carousels and all the way out to the plate glass windows facing ground transportation.

I saw Bill immediately. Not because I recognized him from any past description from Nick, but because the sandy-haired Caucasian man held up a poster that said “KATIE KOVACS” in black magic marker. Collin and Kurt saw him, too.

“Uh oh,” I said. If we stopped, we’d give our identity away to anyone looking for us.

“Keep walking,” Collin said.

We strode past him and he didn’t so much as glance in our direction. What I saw next nearly stopped me short.

A Puerto Rican man held up a sign that read “Katie Kovacs.”

Collin muttered under his breath just loud enough for us to hear. “Definitely keep walking now.”

We reached the far end of baggage claim and stopped to discuss.

“Well, looks like we have two greeting committees. One friendly, one unfriendly. Do you know which is which, Katie?” Collin asked.

I bobbed my head up and down. “Bill is Caucasian, not Puerto Rican. The first guy, for sure.”

Kurt said, “I didn’t recognize him. I knew Bill when he was a kid. He and Nick surfed together, and he was a dark-headed boy. I can’t say as I agree with you, Katie. It could be either guy. That second fellow might not be Puerto Rican.”

Collin said, “Oh, this is great.”

“I’ve got Bill’s number. I’ll just call him,” I said.

“Tell him to meet us by the curb,” Collin peered out the windows, “by the taxi stand, in one minute.”

I dialed. It rang and rang. “No answer, not even voicemail. I’ll text him.” I typed our message quickly and hit send. Still, neither man looked down or reached for a phone.

“Shit,” Collin said.

“I have an idea,” I said. “How about one of us walks up to the person next to each of them and asks them if they have seen Bill. Loudly. Whichever one is Bill should react.”

“Sounds good. Only problem is, I’ll bet our follower has seen Bill and his sign. All he has to do now is follow Bill. I’ll go,” Collin said.

He started to walk off, then stopped. “You guys go wait by the taxi stand. Stand apart. Don’t look at each other.”

He barreled his way through the crowd and stopped by the darker of the two men.

“You go first,” I said to Kurt.

And off he went, no words necessary.

Collin appeared to carry out his plan, but the more Puerto-Rican-looking of our two Bill prospects did not react. Collin wheeled around and headed toward the lighter-complected man.

Time for me to leave. I turned away and walked to the taxi stand. I leaned against the wall, twenty feet away from Kurt. A text came in on my iPhone.

Collin. “I have our Bill. He left phone in car. Stay put.”

I forwarded Collin’s text to Kurt. This was nerve-wracking. I checked Nick’s and my email as a way to kill time and keep myself grounded. Nothing there to hold my attention. Five minutes passed. I felt eyes on me.
Don’t look up.
I wished I had my hat to cover my hair, but even though I wore it to the airport in the DR, I’d stuffed it into my suitcase when we checked in for our flight. How hard would I be to identify in the San Juan airport? “Bring me the tall, pale, late-thirties woman with long red hair and a serious set of saddle bags under her eyes.” Ha, no problem.

A junker Impala pulled up to the curb in front of me. Collin’s voice called from the passenger side, “Get in.”

I got in. The Impala lurched forward. Collin repeated his command, and Kurt sat beside me in the backseat. Again, the Impala lurched forward.

“Guys, this is Bill Thomas. Bill, this is Katie and Kurt,” Collin said. I could barely hear him over Whitesnake advising us to take it down slow and easy. I wondered if Bill was playing it on eight-track.

“Welcome to San Juan,” Bill said. He careened around a slower vehicle. “Let’s go get Nick.”

I tried not to gape. My quick glimpse of Bill in baggage claim had not done him justice. At nearly forty years of age, he had wavy shoulder-length hair, scraggly and sun-bleached. He was Jeff Spicoli from
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
, the twenty-year reunion version. I had trouble picturing my husband hanging out with Bill, but reminded myself it was years ago. The surfers’ bond and all that.

“Hi, Bill,” I said.

“Hi, yourself. So you’re Nick’s hot wife. Wow. Now I know why he hitched a ride with me through a hurricane to get to you.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I chose silence, which Kurt filled, thank goodness.

Kurt said, “I’m Nick’s father. We’ve met.”

“Yes sir, we have, and don’t hold it against me. I’ve grown up a lot since then. Not completely, but a lot.”

He almost clipped the bumper of a car as he pulled in front of it, and the driver blared his horn. It was lost on Bill.

“We have to assume the bad guys are on to us. But I have a plan.”

Bill momentarily took his eyes from the road to watch Collin. His hand started tapping on the steering wheel, beating out a crazy rhythm and occasionally crashing an imaginary cymbal to his right. The bad guys wouldn’t need to worry about us if Bill killed us off in San Juan traffic.
Eyes on road, both hands on wheel.

Collin continued. “Bill said it will take us about five hours to cruise around the coast and stage ourselves nearest Mona. He wants to make our final approach in daylight, because the waters are a little treacherous out there, due to the reefs and all. It’s ten p.m. now. So let’s go check into a hotel on the beach near the marina. Make it look to any followers like we’ve tucked in for the night. Bill knows just the place.”

“Yeah, there’s a Holiday Inn Express about a half mile from the San Juan Bay Marina, which is where the
Kate
is,” Bill said.

“We’ll get a ground floor room with beach access, slip out the beach side at about midnight, and walk to the marina. If we’re followed and anyone is watching in the lobby, they’ll never see us.”

Kurt said, “What if they’re out back?”

Collin said, “Then we get the joy of changing the plan. Because flexibility is the key to air power.”

I jumped into the conversation. “I like it. To make it look authentic, we should get two rooms.” And I could shower and change in one. Thank God.

Bill gave us directions from the hotel to the
Wild Irish Kate.
“I’m going to sleep until you guys get there, so just come on the boat and in through the back door. Yell for me. I’ll wake up. She’s fueled and ready to go.”

He brought the Impala to a quick stop that whipped my head forward and then back. “Well, look at that, I got you here safe and sound,” he said.

God help us, this was the man we were trusting to get us to Nick.

Hang on, Nick. We’re getting closer
.

At least, I hoped we were.

Collin insisted on paying for the rooms.

“Don’t worry, sis, you can pay me back later. In fact, I’ll even take a personal check.”

I punched his arm. My brother’s humor and confidence were a lifesaver. If you focused on my helpers—Kurt and Collin—and not my missing husband or the problems back at Annalise, I was pretty darn lucky.

When we got to our musty beachside rooms, Collin and Kurt napped in theirs while I showered in mine. I worried about thugs breaking in the entire time and wished I’d barricaded the door, but blessedly no thugs showed up and the hot water made up for the dank smell. After I got out, I saw a request from Julie to Skype.

We established a connection. I heard the beautiful strains of “What I Did for Love” playing softly in the background before the video showed an image. Julie had taught music all her life until she moved to St. Marcos. I identified the big, emotional Broadway numbers with her.

“Hey,” I said.

Julie was not alone. Rashidi’s friendly face glowed in my LCD screen beside her. “Hey,” they both said.

Julie spoke quickly. “We want to hear everything you have time to tell us, but we also have to let you know what happened here today.”

That sounded bad, and her face looked worse. “More than crazy Tim carrying off Taylor? What’s up?” I asked. “The kids? Tutein?”

“Sort of Tutein. Not really. Good news on that front, though. Rashidi was out with Ava, Laura, and Rob earlier. They found your slave graveyard.”

Rashidi said, “We gonna fix things, Katie. There’s a grave dug up within the last few days, but hard to say. Very suspicious. Anyway, don’t worry, we got it in hand.”

I sure hoped he was right. “You guys are awesome. Even thinking about this right now is more than I can handle. Thank you so much.”

He ducked his head, letting an avalanche of beads and dreadlocks fall forward, and he smiled.

Julie spoke again. “We had a little more excitement here, as well. While Rashidi was out at the graveyard, Ruth and I were here with the kids, feeding them dinner. This was maybe two hours ago, after I talked to you. It had just gotten dark. We both felt this vibration, then the dishes started shaking, and the pictures were rattling on their hooks against the walls, and books were falling off shelves. I thought we were having an earthquake.”

Earthquakes were not uncommon on St. Marcos, so this was a reasonable explanation, unless you lived up at Annalise. I knew what was coming next.

“Of course it wasn’t an earthquake, it was Annalise. We grabbed the kids. The dogs outside started barking like mad, and Oso went crazy, running around all of us like he was herding sheep. And then I heard a screaming noise from outside.”

My hand flew to my throat.

“The noise was a voice, and it became clear it was a man. He was carrying on like a banshee. We looked out the kitchen windows. We saw two local men with their hands in the air, and we saw Dan-Dan with a machete, swinging it around their heads. Dan-Dan was the one screaming.”

“Oh my God, Julie! Are you guys OK?”

“Oh honey, we’re fine, thanks to Dan-Dan and the dogs. Ruth and I called out to Dan-Dan to see if he needed help, and he told us that these two men were no match for the likes of him, or as he said, ‘These anti-mans ain’t no match for me a’tall’.” She made a passable attempt at a local accent. “The dogs knew Dan-Dan was their ally, and they circled around the other two men. Want to guess who they were?”

“My money is on Pumpy and loony Tim. Again.”

“And your money wins,” she said.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Ruth and I decided it would do no good to call the police. So we told Dan-Dan to take care of them. Last we saw, he had marched them off into the night with all the dogs except Oso with him. Rashidi got here about ten minutes after it happened, and he didn’t see any sign of them.”

“Unreal,” I said. And it was. I pictured Pumpy and the old wacko tied up next to a bonfire way back in the bush with Dan-Dan dancing around them in full war paint. I liked it.

“Taylor worships Dan-Dan even more now. He has out that wooden pig he gave him, and he’s playing Dan-Dan the hero games.”

“As well he should,” I said. My sweet boy.

Rashidi added, “Annalise was ready to help, but Dan-Dan took care of things before they got close enough to feel her wrath.”

Pumpy had seen Annalise’s wrath before, but now he was showing up again anyway. The man was not a fast learner.

“Way to go, Annalise,” I said, raising my voice. I laughed at myself inside; it wasn’t like Annalise was hard of hearing.

Rashidi spoke again. “So Katie, we gotta take care of this thing with DPNR. It can’t wait for you and Nick to get back. We meeting with Attorney Vince Robinson tomorrow. He coming out here so Julie can be in the meeting, too.”

I loved his absolute faith in Nick’s well-being and return, and I fought back a tear. “Yeah, I agree. Thank you, guys.”

“No problem. Now update us on Nick,” Julie said. “And why you left the DR.”

As bad as it was for me to be missing Nick and scared to death, it was worse for Julie. Nick was her son, and she’d lost her daughter not so long ago. Plus, I had the satisfaction of action, of searching. I was in the know on every bit of information we could find. Julie was stuck at home, powerless and outside the loop. Not to mention facing down Tutein alone. Yet she remained composed, at least on the surface.

So I filled them in, sparing no detail, including my crazy dreams and our harrowing time with the men following us. And with Bill’s driving.

Rashidi said, “You, Nick, and Annalise just made for each other. And from what I hear, you got a message from him this morning, so that mean he still fine, then.”

Julie’s mouth was so tight from holding back tears that she had the wrinkles of a lifelong smoker, even though she was a true Sandra Dee and had never touched a single one. “He’s going to be all right, Katie. I know he is.”

“He is, Julie,” I said. My mouth felt pretty tight, too. “He is.” I slowed down and a yawn overtook me. “I know the kids must be long since asleep?”

“Yes. I’m sorry, honey,” Julie said.

“Please kiss them all over their faces for me and tell them I love them. And see if Ruth will let you hug her.”

“Absolutely,” Julie replied. “Giving that a try should be quite entertaining.”

Rashidi said, “Ava say she love you. She working hard on this. She got Rob and Laura whipped into a frenzy. Not a minute go by we not praying for you, thinking of you and Nick. And Ava say to tell you she not gonna let you down this time, not ever again.”

I had maintained rigid control until this point. How had Ava snuck up on my blindside? My tears pooled and I wiped my eyes.

“Well, I’ll pray for all of you, too. Please keep my babies safe. I’m afraid I have to go roust the men now. Time for us to catch a ride on the
Wild Irish Kate
.”

I straightened up and popped my neck to each side, readying myself for the return to action. We said our goodbyes. I stared at the screen as the speaker made the call-ending noise that always made me think of Sylvester the Cat collapsing in a heap after Tweety Bird pelted him over the head. I sat up straighter. I would not collapse.

I stared past the hunter green drapes that were pulled back to reveal the black night and ocean through the glass door. We were about to get on a boat with a stranger and race at top speed through unfamiliar waters in the dead of night. I tested myself for fear and found none. None except the fear that we were too late or looking in the wrong place.

But I couldn’t think those thoughts. I had to believe. I had to be the one. Nick was counting on me. I drew in a deep breath and closed my eyes, picturing Nick’s face. I opened them, grabbed my bag, and headed next door.

Here I come, baby.