by Amy Vansant
Still, the wreath was a stroke of genius. ’Tis the season...
Hilarious.
She snorted a laugh.
“What are you laughing at?” asked Louis.
She cleared her throat. “Hm? Nothing.”
He shook his head and continued playing a video game on his computer.
Stephanie frowned.
Then there’s Louis. Handsome and virile at first glance—like so many powerful men’s coddled progeny—he’d turned out to be a weak-minded man-child playing Scarface. Worse, he felt invincible now, thanks to her talents. Sure, he paid well, but she didn’t enjoy feeling like the spineless king’s pet dragon.
In addition, she’d realized too late that working for Louis meant revealing herself to him. He knew what she was.
She didn’t like that at all.
One of the men Louis kept around to flatter him popped his head into the office. Most of the guys working for the organization answered directly to Pirro. They were the ones with the dead eyes and questionable tattoos. Then there were one or two who looked like summer interns; they’d followed Louis from the distribution center to his dry cleaning headquarters, all the while catering to his every whim. Irony Dry Cleaning was Louis’ legitimate front business, and as many of the transactions were cash, served useful for laundering money as well.
“Pirro’s going to take care of the old person disco,” said the kid at the door.
Louis shrugged. “Okay.”
For an answer, the man tapped the door frame twice with his palm and left.
Stephanie scowled. She’d tailed Seamus once to what turned out to be an underground club for old people. She thought it was some sort of money-making scheme, but it belonged to his girlfriend. What was her name...?
Jackie.
“What’s this about an old person disco?” she asked.
Louis shrugged without taking his eyes from his computer screen. “Pirro’s handling it.”
“But why?”
“He says we need the building back. It used to be my father’s. I had a club there for a while. We had ice luges for doing shots and—”
“Why do you need it back?”
The growing excitement in Louis expression snuffed out like a light. He’d probably wanted to talk more about ice luges. “I don’t know, Pirro said so.”
“He’s going to kill her? The lady who owns the club?”
“I dunno.”
“Why didn’t you ask me to do it?”
Louis’s tongue hung from his mouth as he pounded on the keyboard. His character shot some sort of zombie creature into hamburger. “I don’t think I need you to kill an old lady.”
Stephanie grimaced.
This is getting worse.
If something happened to Seamus’s girlfriend and Declan discovered she worked for the group responsible, he’d never forgive her.
She took a deep breath. “I need you to not kill the disco lady.”
“What?”
“Don’t kill the disco lady. I need you to leave her alone.”
Louis’s video game character took a battle axe to the head and collapsed. Louis turned, eyes blazing. “You made me die.”
“Sorry. I need you not to kill the disco lady.”
“Why?”
“She’s a friend of a friend.”
Louis squinted one eye, looking at her as if she had lost her mind.
Frustration growing, Stephanie crossed her legs and folded her hands neatly on her thigh. “Look. I’m asking you, nicely, as a favor to me—the woman who single-handedly wiped out your enemy—not to kill this woman.”
“You haven’t got to the main guy. You’ve killed two—”
“Three.”
Louis’s brow crinkled into a knot. “There were only sixteen fingers.”
“Yeah, I didn’t get the wreath idea until after the first one.”
His eyes softened and his mouth opened, breath escaping like he’d just been told her friend’s daughter didn’t make the cheerleading squad. “Awww. Too bad. It could have been a little bigger.”
She shrugged. “Live and learn. Actually, that reminds me—have you looked into the mole?”
“The what?”
Stephanie closed her eyes so Louis wouldn’t see them roll. The first man she’d dispatched under his employ had surprised her two days after she met Louis. No one should have known who she was or that she’d been hired to kill the rival boss. Yet forty-eight hours into their partnership, there lurked a clumsy goon in the shadowy corner near her office. Unfortunately for him, he prowled in darkness provided by Stephanie for the express purpose of catching potential intruders. She knew her enemies would consider the burnt bulb in that area serendipitous. All she had to do was be prepared whenever she turned that one corner.
She’d been prepared. The goon had been surprised. Disposing of a man in her office parking lot was not ideal, so she’d disposed of the body quickly and without flair. For the next two hits, she’d had the time to harvest a few wreath-making souvenirs.
Now she owed this other drug lord a visit. If only—
“You haven’t told me who the other kingpin is. Did you figure out who he is?” asked Louis.
If only she knew.
Stephanie felt her shoulders slump. She hadn’t found him yet. She didn’t realize no one knew the identity of the rival bigwig until she’d killed three of his soldiers. Three chances to torture the information out of people, lost forever.
“You didn’t tell me he was a mystery man,” she grumbled.
“Everyone knows that.”
“I’m not a drug dealer, moron, how would I know?”
Louis’s expression tightened. She’d forgotten the cardinal rule of Louis: Never let him know what an idiot he is.
“Well, too bad. Disco lady has to die,” he spat, turning his attention back to his screen.
Stephanie felt rage bubbling inside her. There were no less than six things on his desk, from his Maserati keys to his stupid pewter University of Florida alligator statue, that she could use to kill him before he had time to shoot another zombie.
Her problem was the men outside his office. Even if she killed every one of them, the gunfire would bring another twenty running. An inbred army of swamp trash worked for Pirro at the compound. Half of them lived here.
That’s probably why they want Jackie’s club. The compound was getting cramped as Pirro ramped up to take over more corners.
She stood, and the abrupt action made Louis swivel, leaning back in his office chair as if trying to keep his face far from her reach. He looked frightened.
“I’m telling you, do not kill that woman,” she said through gritted teeth.
Louis’s bottom lip thrust out like a scolded child’s.
“But I don’t really know anything about it. This is Pirro’s thing.”
“So you’re not the boss? I’m sorry. I’d been under the impression you were the boss. Like your father was.”
There. I did it.
She’d pushed the emergency you’re not your father button.
Louis’s cheek twitched. “Pirro!”
No answer came from the other room.
He stood and yelled again. “Pirro!”
The man who had stopped by earlier poked his head in the door once more.
“What’s up boss?”
“Where’s Pirro?”
“He’s off doin’ that thing.”
“The disco?”
The man nodded.
Louis looked at Stephanie.
“Call him,” she growled.
Louis scowled and pointed at the man in the doorway. “Call him!”
The man nodded and pulled his phone from his pocket.
“Went to voicemail.”
“Why?”
“No signal out there.”
Louis again turned to Stephanie. “No signal.”
“I can hear him.” She snatched her purse from the chair and headed for the door.
&
nbsp; “Where are you going?” asked Louis.
“Home.”
She pushed past the man with the phone in his hand and walked through the door. Slipping a hand into her purse as she strode down the hall, she realized her gun was missing.
She’d left it at the office.
Stupid.
She didn’t breathe again until she entered her car.
Louis wasn’t a problem—she could debone him like a chicken. Pirro, on the other hand, never warmed to her charms. Even her finger wreath didn’t make him happy.
He wanted her gone.
She suspected Pirro was responsible for the man hiding in her office’s shadows, so he had to be twice as unhappy with her now that his assassin had gone missing. When Pirro finished exploiting Louis’s father’s name and connections, she suspected someone would be hiding in Louis’s shadows as well.
Today, she’d been worried that Pirro’s men wouldn’t let her leave and now she wasn’t prepared for a war. She knew the compound was a danger zone for her, and still she’d forgotten her gun. Hunting untrained thugs, whose deaths wouldn’t even be properly investigated by the police, had made her lazy as a zoo-fed lioness.
She scanned the parking lot. Pirro’s car was missing.
He’s already on his way to Jackie’s.
She had to protect Jackie for Declan.
She turned the ignition of her candy apple red Dodge Viper.
This was the problem with relationships. You cared for one person, and next thing you knew, you had to look after the people they cared about and blah, blah, blah.
Exiting on to the dirt road that led from the compound, Stephanie watched her rearview to be sure no one followed her.
She was clear.
Time to think.
Bobbing her head from side to side she considered a few options for her next move. First, she had to save Jackie. She knew the disco was in the middle of nowhere and relatively indefensible against Pirro’s blood-thirsty gang of dirtballs. Without her, Jackie didn’t stand a chance. Even Seamus would get himself killed in this situation. The old man was getting older.
If she saved Jackie, Declan would be grateful. Maybe he’d see she was changing for him.
That’s all he ever wanted from her.
She was sure.
Chapter Twelve
“Find anything interesting?” asked Declan as he and Charlotte headed into the center of Florida. Already the landscape had gone from suburban sprawl to jungle safari.
Charlotte sat fiddling with Ryan Finnegan’s phone.
“The phone isn’t quite as old as I thought, but old enough that it isn’t locked, so that’s a plus.”
“And it took a charge?”
“A little so far. I’ll plug it in again when we get to Jackie’s but right now I have about fifteen percent to try and figure...”
Charlotte’s voice trailed off.
“Find something?”
“Pictures. A lot of dark, murky pictures of men standing on corners and cars and license plates... I think Ryan was watching drug dealers.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It sure looks like surveillance, though. Like he was watching the corners and keeping a record of things he thought important.”
“Maybe he’s a cop? DEA?”
“Maybe.”
Charlotte continued flipping and the photos switched from city corners to the interior of a dimly lit saloon. A woman in slouchy clothes sat at the bar looking out the window. Everything in the image was dark except her shock of blonde hair, peeking from beneath her baseball cap. There was something very familiar about her...
“Stephanie.”
“What?”
“There’s a picture of Stephanie in here.”
Declan huffed. “You’re kidding.”
Charlotte flipped through a few more photos. “No. I’m not. It’s definitely her.”
She held up the screen and Declan removed his attention from the road long enough to gander. Charlotte thought she saw him pale. She sometimes wondered just how traumatic his former romantic relationship with Stephanie had been. He nearly always had a visceral reaction to her presence. Now, just a photo of her made him wan.
She supposed it made sense. People always made jokes about how terrible their mothers-in-law were, but Stephanie’s real mother turned out to be a serial killer. Talk about dodging a bullet.
Literally.
“Eh, might be her. You can’t tell from that blurry mess,” he said, but she could tell he was fooling himself.
Charlotte zoomed in on a picture but found the blonde woman’s face didn’t grow any clearer in the murky photo. It didn’t matter. She could feel it in her bones that the woman in the photo was Stephanie. Declan wasn’t the only one who suffered visceral reactions to the image of that flaxen viper.
“It’s her. I swear that woman haunts my dreams.”
Declan laughed. “Your dreams? Imagine how I feel.”
Charlotte continued to flip through the phone. There were a few more photos taken from the bar. In one, it appeared to be dusk outside, and she recognized the same drug-riddled street corners she’d seen in the earlier photos.
“Does Stephanie do drugs?”
Declan shook his head. “She likes her whiskey but she’s never been into drugs. And she had plenty of opportunities—”
Charlotte looked up as Declan cut short.
“What do you mean?”
“What?”
“You said she had plenty of opportunities and then just stopped mid-sentence.”
“Oh, I just mean, you know, she grew up hard. Hung out with the wrong people. The woman her mother dumped her on was a train wreck. If she’d wanted to start taking drugs it wouldn’t have been that difficult for her to find them.”
“Ah. Gotcha.” Charlotte watched Declan a moment longer. She couldn’t shake the feeling he wasn’t being entirely honest with her.
“Can you think of any reason she’d be hanging out in shady bars located near drug corners?”
He shrugged. “Who knows what she’s up to at any given moment? She’s a criminal defense attorney. Maybe she was meeting a client there.”
Charlotte nodded. That wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Could Ryan be Stephanie’s client? No. The photos were taken from the opposite side of the establishment. She didn’t appear to see him.
But what was Ryan’s interest in Stephanie? Most of the other photos were of men—boys really—selling drugs or loitering as if waiting for the chance to sell them. There were more photos of that ilk and then a few more of Stephanie. She wore the same clothes but the gap between the pictures made Charlotte check the date stamps. They weren’t all taken on the same day. Stephanie had been at that bar more than once wearing the same drab, shapeless clothing.
She could call Stephanie a lot of things, but lousy dresser wasn’t one of them. The girl always looked like she was on her way to a sexy magazine photo shoot.
It was one of the things Charlotte hated most about her.
That, and what appeared to be a laser focus on destroying Charlotte’s relationship with Declan.
Charlotte shook her head to clear it of petty jealousy. It was stupid to waste a single second worrying about Stephanie’s motives with Declan.
Okay. Done. Back to business.
Charlotte reasoned if the sloppy clothes didn’t fit Stephanie’s style, they had to be a costume. She was attempting to go unnoticed in that filthy bar.
Stephanie is doing her own surveillance.
That had to be it. Stephanie appeared to be killing time, and nothing said surveillance like killing time somewhere you’d rather not be.
Was she working with Ryan?
Maybe. Or maybe Ryan noticed Stephanie because he’d been watching that corner long enough to know she didn’t belong. He took photos of her because she didn’t belong. He may or may not have known where she fit in his puzzle, but he knew she was an interesting piece.
Charlotte re
sumed flipping and the photos of Stephanie ended. More drug activity appeared. She saw what appeared to be the third or fourth instance of a black Mercedes parked at the curb. One of the boys from the corner was talking to someone inside.
The man in that car must be the boss. Or at least someone a notch up from the kids on the corner. Ryan’s camera didn’t take the best pictures so there was no way to identify the people in the car.
A few photos later, Ryan’s world seemed much happier. There were a few pictures of the beach taken from a high vantage point. She recognized them as views from Ryan’s condo.
A young man’s image appeared. It was a photo of another photo; she could make out the edges of the frame. It was the photo of Craig, Ryan’s son, she’d seen on the table at his condo. The next photo was a piece of paper. A form. She zoomed in.
“An autopsy report,” she said aloud.
“What’s that?”
“He took a photo of his son’s autopsy report. Craig Finnegan.” She squinted, trying to read through the coroner’s report using the blurry zoom. “Drug overdose.”
“He lost his son?”
Charlotte nodded. “Mariska and Darla remembered Ryan when he lived in Pineapple Port. Apparently, his son died and left him money. After that, he moved to the condo we visited. They didn’t know how his son died, but it looks like drug overdose.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Hold on...it looks like he died here. I thought Ryan’s son died out in Silicon Valley where he made his money, but this report was filled out by a Florida coroner.”
“Maybe he was visiting his dad when he died.”
“Maybe.”
Charlotte sat in silence for a moment before beginning to think out loud.
“That would make you crazy.”
“Losing a son?”
“And losing a son on your watch. From all accounts, his son was doing very well in California, then he comes here to visit his dad and dies of a drug overdose.”
“You’re thinking Ryan was trying to find out who sold his son the drugs.”
Charlotte nodded. “He’s watching the corners like a cop. He’s trying to find who’s to blame.”
“And maybe bring them down.”
“And then he goes missing.”
“Doesn’t seem like much of a mystery why he went missing when you know what he’s been up to.”