Lighthouse Cottage

by Barbara Cool Lee

  "I have to tell you something," he said, in a completely different tone from the one he'd used when describing flying paper planes. He sounded serious. Authoritative. A bit resigned.

  "Yeah. I didn't think you'd come up here to check the wind conditions." She looked at the box. "So what is this thing, anyway? Some kind of recording device?"

  He shook his head. "Exactly the opposite. It dampens any electronic signals in the room."

  She smiled. "You mean in case there are any bugs in here."

  He didn't smile back. "You are quick, aren't you?"

  "You've gotta be kidding." But he clearly wasn't. He just looked at her, waiting for her to digest the information that he actually believed there could be some kind of listening devices in Aunt Zee's living room.

  "Why would anyone want to listen in on Aunt Zee's conversations? You think there's a secret group planning to stage a coup and take over the Historical Society?"

  That got a smile out of him. "You don't think you're as sharp-witted as Ms. Zelda?"

  She sat back. He kept saying things like that. She really had never thought of herself as being anything like Aunt Zee, but maybe she was underestimating herself. The look in his eyes said he viewed her as just as formidable an adversary as her great-aunt. That was both flattering and a little disturbing, since being the adversary of the infamous Shadow was probably not a safe position to be in.

  "Okay," she said. "You've got my attention."

  He nodded. "Good. Because this is important." He leaned back, resting his head on the cushion and gazing up at the art deco ceiling. Then he began to speak.

  "I was eighteen when I went off to college at Cal—the University of California at Berkeley. It's pretty close to the City—San Francisco. My girlfriend at the time went with me."

  "Juliet," she said.

  "Yeah. Juliet. She wasn't going to college. Just came along and stayed with me. We had a little apartment. She had been in some trouble with drugs in high school, but I thought she was clean. She told me she was clean." He closed his eyes, and then spit out some short sentences as if he wanted to get through this part of story quickly: "I was busy. I didn't notice how unhappy she was. She wasn't speaking to her parents. She didn't know anybody. I was busy with school and a work-study job I had. She started staying away from the apartment. Longer and longer times would pass. She wouldn't tell me where she was going."

  He sat up straight again, and reached down to rub his sore leg.

  "One day she didn't come back. It took me some time, but I finally tracked her down. In the Tenderloin."

  "The Tenderloin?"

  "A part of San Francisco where someone would go if they were looking for drugs. For trouble." He sighed. "A place someone would go if they were on their way downhill and didn't know how to get back up again."

  "But you found her."

  He stopped rubbing his leg. His hands went to his lap and he clenched them into fists. "Eventually. She was dead when I found her. In a drug house. The other people there hadn't even noticed she had died. They were lost in their own personal nightmares. She had died all alone in that room full of people—" His voice broke then. He looked down at his hands.

  Lori moved closer to him on the couch. She put her hand over his clenched fists. "It wasn't your fault."

  He opened his hands, staring at the palms as if he would find an answer there. She moved back from him a bit. Watched as he got the emotion under control and a mask came down over his face. When he finally looked up at her he appeared completely impassive.

  He continued, in a controlled voice that betrayed no emotion. "I was questioned by the police for a long time. This one cop—I thought he was a cop—he kept bringing me in to talk. I thought he blamed me. I thought he was looking for a way to pin her death on me."

  She got up and went to look out the lotus door. Shadowfax as always got up to follow her. She saw only her own pale reflection in the glass, as if the world outside didn't even exist. Even the black dog seemed as shadowy as a ghost in the glass. Nothing seemed real but that crisp, impassive voice behind her. "So what happened next?" she asked, sensing he was leading somewhere with this, that this was more than just a story from the past that he felt he needed to share with her.

  "I'd prefer you stayed away from the window."

  "Because someone might be out there reading my lips?" She said it as a joke, but when she turned back to face him she saw the look on his face. "You're serious."

  "Actually, they can decode the vibrations the glass makes when you speak."

  She almost said, 'you've gotta be kidding,' but he clearly wasn't.

  "Please," he said, holding out a hand.

  She came back and sat down in her former place at the far end of the couch, and Shadowfax took up his post again at her feet.

  "The man I thought was a cop came to me a few months later. He told me there was a gang of bikers who were flooding college campuses all along the coast with a particularly high-grade form of methamphetamine. Kids were dying. He asked me if I wanted to do something about it."

  All the pieces fell into place. Her instincts telling her this man was good, and kind, and somehow not what he was supposed to be. "You're an undercover cop." She said it in a whisper, suddenly aware of his obsession with secrecy and fears of being overheard.

  But he shook his head. "Not a police officer."

  "What then? FBI, CIA, NSA? Something like that?"

  He smiled. "Something like that. You wouldn't have heard of us. That's sort-of the point."

  She grinned at him, relieved that everything her gut had been telling her was true, and that she wasn't nuts to find herself wanting to trust him, despite all the evidence telling her he was evil. "You're a good guy."

  He laughed at that. "Well, if you divide the world into good guys and bad guys, I guess you could say I'm a good guy."

  She moved over to sit right next to him, wrapped her arms around him, and kissed him.

  Reluctantly, Matt pulled away from her. "You won't want to do that once you hear the rest."

  She sat back. "What else is there? You are not evil like everyone says. You just pretend to be to stop the bad guys. Isn't that the truth?"

  "That's close enough," he muttered, his eyes watching her mouth, though he had been the one to pull away from the kiss.

  "We're both interested in each other—or am I wrong about that?"

  He reached up his hand and brushed one finger across her lips. "No. You're not wrong." Then he frowned. "But there's more. My job is dangerous. And anyone who spends time with me will have to deal with the complications of that."

  She moved back to curl up on the far side of the sofa again, hugging her knees up to her chest, walling herself off from the danger. "Your big, messy, unsafe life," she muttered.

  "I wouldn't have described it quite like that, but yeah." He sighed. "It's complicated." He looked down at the device on the coffee table. "I'm running out of battery power, so I have to explain the rest quickly. Then, if you're still speaking to me, I'll take you down to the wharf and make you pizza for dinner." He looked over at her, as if he expected her to say no.

  "If you're asking me out, the answer is yes. Unless you're about to tell me you're not a drug dealer but you secretly torture kittens or something."

  "Nope. But...." He hesitated again. "Let me just explain a bit of what's going on. Obviously nothing I say here can leave this room."

  She nodded. "Obviously."

  "So let's say there's this off-books agency. We'll call it the Project."

  "I've never heard of it."

  He smiled. "That would be the point of an off-books black ops agency."

  "Okay. Got it. So I can't google them and learn about their missions or anything like that."

  "Exactly. They don't exist. They're funded out of shell corporations and they have no official budget and no one actually works for them."

  "What do you mean, no one works for them?"

  "I technically work for
an import-export business based in L.A. My partner works for a tourist company based in Hawaii. No one in the government has ever heard of us. Officially."

  "But why is all this necessary? I mean—" she nodded to the device on the table. "This cloak and dagger stuff? Aren't you just trying to catch drug dealers?"

  "We don't catch drug dealers. Not the ones you're thinking of—not some sad character with a drug habit who sells a little on the side to make ends meet." He sighed. "We go after the big fish. The billion-dollar money launderers, the international corporations with offshore bank accounts who buy politicians and run the prison gangs and are the real ones controlling the small-time criminals you see arrested on the evening news."

  "White collar crime," she said.

  "Not unless you consider murdering hundreds of people white collar crime. Let me give you an example. Let's say there's this really vicious, murderous guy who runs an international drug cartel. We'll call him el hombre con las manos sucias."

  She thought back to her basic Spanish class. "The Man with—"

  "—the Dirty Hands."

  "So he doesn't bathe regularly."

  "Actually he wears designer suits and is college educated and fluent in several languages. He got his nickname because he strangles his enemies with his bare hands. It's his signature. It's a very effective leadership style," he said dryly. "He has tremendously loyal employees, because they know if they quit their boss will personally send them out in a body bag."

  Lori sat and listened, trying to accept that this world he was talking about really existed. That there were really people who did things like this.

  "Are you okay?" Matt asked. "I'm sorry this is upsetting you."

  "No," she said firmly. "I'm fine. But why don't they just arrest this dirty hands guy for murder?"

  "He's not in the U.S. He left when he was placed on the most wanted list. In his home country, he bribes police and government officials so they won't arrest him. Even though he has killed American citizens, and has committed crimes in the United States, our government can't touch him. Now our government could send a team of soldiers into that other country and kill him, but that would cause an international incident. So he can sit in his mansion, collecting his billions of dollars in blood money, and nothing can be done to stop him."

  "Except something off the record, off the books?"

  He nodded. "That's where we come in. The Project's job is to find a way to make him do something stupid, like, say, set foot onto U.S. soil so he can be arrested. That's the only way to stop the killing, the torture."

  "If he's so smart, how do you make him do that?"

  "By convincing him that if he comes here he can exact revenge on his number one enemy at no risk to himself."

  "Who's his number one enemy?"

  He smiled. "That would be me. I got inside his organization and then betrayed him. Very publicly. In a very embarrassing way that made him lose face. He can't let that stand, or he'll look weak. He has to stop me. And he wants to do it himself, to prove his invincibility."

  "Let me get this straight: you are going to get this dangerous guy—"

  "Sergio Moreno."

  "Sergio Moreno, to come to Pajaro Bay to kill you?"

  "To the lighthouse, actually, which is why your great-aunt's last-minute plan to invite you there messed up our plan. It wouldn't have bothered Moreno if he found out about you. He'd just have you killed." He paused. "But we really didn't want him to do that."

  "Gee, I appreciate that. That's why you came to the island?"

  "Except I got shot."

  "Who shot you?"

  "Good question."

  "But you are going to go back out there and let this guy strangle you?"

  Matt nodded. He seemed to be pretty casual about the whole thing. "Midnight tonight."

  "How melodramatic."

  "He's a melodramatic kind of guy. I don't have to let him strangle me. I just have to catch him on U.S. soil."

  "That's nice. So you don't have to actually die to catch him."

  "I'd rather not, if it isn't necessary."

  "That's good. You'll just arrest him as soon as you see him."

  "Not exactly. There's another problem."

  "Which is?"

  He glanced down at the device again. "We're about out of time here, so I'll say it quickly. There's someone with knowledge of our organization who's been feeding info to Moreno. We have to find that person. That's the real purpose of our mission. We need to make that person show himself."

  She felt a chill run over her, though the room was warm enough. "You're not just telling me this for no reason, are you? This all has something to do with me." He held out his hand to her, and this time she took it, scooting over close to him and resting her head on his shoulder. "Please tell me this guy isn't after me."

  "I'd love to tell you that. I can't."

  She sat up. "Why? Why me?"

  "The mole, the enemy agent if you will, told Moreno your name. It's possible they plan to use you in some way to get to me."

  "Oh, great."

  "It's also possible that the message with your name is just a way of getting me rattled, distracting me. The message wasn't sent in code, so we were able to intercept it. Now that's either a stupid mistake on their part, or they did it deliberately to confuse us."

  "But you don't know which?"

  "No. So you need to be protected. And I've arranged for that."

  "Are you sure the person protecting me isn't the mole?"

  "You are good at this. Yes. I'm sure. The person is José Serrano."

  "Deputy Joe?"

  "You've met him?"

  She nodded.

  "Good. I know he's not the mole. I've known him all my life and he's one of the few people I really trust in this town. So he will watch this house all night while we are running around playing cops and robbers. As long as you stay here you'll be safe."

  She shuddered. "What if I'd gone to the opera with Aunt Zee?"

  "Then we would have had an agent follow you. It would have been easy in a big city like San Francisco."

  "Too bad I hate opera."

  "Yeah. But since you're here, we've got Joe."

  The lights on the machine flashed a red warning. "And now we have to stop talking about it," he said. "Joe gets off duty at 9 p.m. In the meantime, we'll go have dinner, and I'll keep you in my sights until he can take over."

  He reached to switch off the device and she said, "Wait! I wanted to ask you about Shadowfax—where he comes from, his training, all that."

  "We need this working for that story." He nodded to the machine. "I'll get fresh batteries at the restaurant and tell you the rest."

  Chapter Thirteen

  When he parked at the base of the wharf, Lori got out of his crazy-looking sports car and grabbed Shadowfax's leash. "Come on, boy." The poor dog had been jammed on the floorboards while she sat in the bucket seat. Not the most practical car, but she figured it fit the evil "Shadow" she was hanging out with. The dog managed to scramble out of the car.

  Matt got his cane and they walked all the way to the end of the wharf where the restaurant sat. He wasn't limping too badly, but she wondered how much the wound might be hurting him.

  But when she asked him he just shrugged it off. "Would you prefer ocean or marina view?" he asked.

  She hadn't seen the restaurant on a clear night before. The view was incredible. One side of the restaurant faced out toward the open sea and the lighthouse island, and the other side looked back at the lights of Pajaro Bay and the boats in the marina.

  "Wow," was all she could think of to say.

  "Yeah," he said. "There are companies that would kill for this spot, but we've got the lease for another 40 years. As long as we pay the bills, it's ours."

  "Have you ever thought of just coming back here and working in the family business?"

  "Not until recently," he said, looking at her with an expression she couldn't pin down—longing, maybe?
/>   He opened the door for her.

  "What about the dog?" she asked.

  "We'll eat out on the deck," he answered.

  Inside the place was pretty quiet, with a couple of women (one elegant and sleek, one red-haired and extremely pregnant) laughing together over pizza at one table, and an attractive, dark-haired couple holding hands at a table for two in front of one of the ocean-facing windows. The candles on the tables flickered and the place smelled wonderfully of pizza, making her mouth water.

  Matt stiffened. She noticed he was looking at the nice couple holding hands.

  "What's the matter?" she whispered.

  The man at the table looked up. He quickly looked away from Matt as if he were embarrassed.

  Matt took her hand and led them quickly to a side door and outside. "Who is that?" she whispered.

  "Kyle Madrigal," he said.

  "Aren't you friends?"

  "We were."

  She looked back in the windows and saw that the man was watching Matt with something that looked like pity. She looked away, feeling embarrassed for Kyle, for Matt, for all of them.

  The empty outside dining area had high glass walls that protected it from the wind. They were alone out there, with a view of the marina below them. Matt turned on the outside lights, then lit a gas heater that created a circle of warmth around one of the tables. He motioned for her to sit.

  She did, and signaled Shadowfax to lie down next to her. He did, then put his head on his paws and watched the proceedings.

  Matt gathered some of the unlit candles from the other empty tables and brought them to their table.

  She saw that the candles were battery operated. He opened them and took the batteries, exchanging them with the ones in the little device he'd used before.

  Once the green lights were on, he said: "After tonight, things will change. I went to work in Moreno's organization about five years ago. That was the beginning of this case. Tonight is the end. One way or another."

  "Meaning one of you might end up dead."

  "Or both of us," he said with a shrug.

  "When will you know? If your plan worked, I mean?"

  He smiled. "Let's just say you should stay away from the wharf around midnight. So what do you want on your pizza?"