by Lisa Jackson
“Congratulations,” he said. “I was hoping all evening to get a chance to meet you. You were much too popular. And I was much too shy.” He grinned and extended his hand. “Landry Jones.”
He was anything but shy, she thought as her hand disappeared into his large one. His touch was gentle but there was raw power behind it. She shivered as she looked into his dark eyes, and he grinned as if he knew exactly what she was thinking.
Amazingly, he was even more striking up close. Not classically handsome. Too rough around the edges for that. He wore khaki chinos and a palm-tree-print short-sleeved shirt and deck shoes. He was tanned and the fingers on his left hand were scraped as if he’d been in a fistfight. He looked like a man who could hold his own in a fight, she thought, as a niggling worry wormed its way into her perfect night.
Landry Jones wasn’t the type of man a woman met at an art showing. Especially not hers.
“So, you’re interested in Florida landscapes?” she asked, cocking her head to one side. “You don’t seem the type.”
He feigned hurt, laughed and gave her a sheepish grin. “Actually I’m more interested in the artist, although I find both intriguing.”
She felt her cheeks heat under his compliment as well as his dark piercing gaze. If he was trying to charm her, he was doing a darned good job. “Thank you.” She wanted to pinch herself. This night was just too good to be true.
“Any chance I could buy you a cup of coffee?” he asked. “Now that we’ve officially met? There’s a coffee shop I know that’s still open not far from here. Or if you’d like something stronger…”
If only this night never had to end. And Landry Jones was like the topping on the cake. And maybe the ice cream, as well.
So what if he wasn’t the type to frequent art shows? For tonight he could be her type, she thought with a thrill.
“Coffee would be great.” She couldn’t trust herself with anything stronger, not while feeling as exhilarated as she was already.
“Coffee it is then,” he said, his smile mesmerizing. “This night calls for a celebration. If you’re feeling adventurous, we could even have a piece of key lime pie.”
She was feeling adventurous, all right.
“My car is just over here.” He pointed down the dark street and suddenly she wasn’t so sure.
She knew she was being silly. But suddenly the reality of the situation hit her. This wasn’t South Dakota and she didn’t know this man from Adam.
The idea of getting into a car with a complete stranger was totally alien to her—and suddenly seemed more than a little dangerous.
Odd as it might seem, she knew everyone back in her small hometown in South Dakota and never dated anyone she didn’t. Now she was about to get into a car with a stranger she’d met just moments before.
While she could hear traffic a few streets over, there was no longer anyone around, all the shops and galleries were now closed and she was feeling a little vulnerable.
She turned, hoping Evan was still inside closing up. Even the gallery lights were out. She hadn’t seen Evan leave, but then all her attention had been on Landry Jones, hadn’t it?
Landry must have seen her indecision and the way her feet were rooted to the sidewalk. “Wait here. I’ll get the car.” He flashed a reassuring smile, then turned and keyed his remote. A set of headlights flashed down the street. She watched him walk toward a newer-model blue BMW, telling herself she was being very foolish.
Yes, she was taking a chance, but hadn’t she had to take a chance when she’d left South Dakota to come to Florida? And look how that had worked out. Sometimes you had to take a chance.
Especially with a handsome man on one of the most exciting nights of her life.
She groaned as she took a few steps down the street away from the gallery—and Landry Jones. With her luck, the man would turn out to be a serial killer ax murderer. Otherwise, it was almost as if he was too perfect.
* * *
AT THE CAR, Landry climbed in and pulled out his cell. He punched speed dial as he watched Willa St. Clair.
“The painting wasn’t in the show,” he said the moment the line was answered. He could see Willa St. Clair waiting for him. “But don’t worry. I’ll find it. I have the artist in my crosshairs right now, so to speak. Tell Zeke I won’t be needing him. I’ll call when I have the disk.” He snapped his cell shut before Freddy D. could argue.
With a start, he saw that Willa St. Clair was walking down the block toward the alley behind the gallery.
He swore as he noticed the change in her. She’d looked a little leery earlier when he’d asked her out. But now she appeared scared and, unless he missed his guess, about to change her mind.
She hadn’t been what he’d expected. One look at her and he’d known he’d have to handle her with kid gloves. At least until he got her in the car.
Now he had to move fast. Once he had her under his control, he told himself, it would be smooth sailing. He grimaced at his own inside joke.
Where the hell was this sailboat painting that Simon had told T and Worm he’d hid the disk in? Landry had come to believe it existed. Simon was smart enough to know that by telling T and Worm, he would also be telling the rest of them. That could explain the intricate description Simon had given the two goons.
But as Landry’s luck would have it, the painting T and Worm described wasn’t in the gallery show.
So where was it? T. and Worm had said that some blond woman had been working at the back of the art studio last night when Simon had gone in. Their description of her matched the artist’s—Willa St. Clair.
She was the key to finding the painting—and ultimately the disk. And Willa St. Clair was going to tell him. One way or another, Landry would have that disk before the night was over.
As he reached to start the car engine and go after her, he heard a soft tap on his side window. He turned and glanced up, only half surprised to see Zeke standing next to his car.
“What the hell do you want?” he asked as he powered down his side window. “Didn’t Freddy D. tell you to call it a night?”
Zeke smiled. “Change of plans, old buddy.”
* * *
WILLA KNEW she would hate herself in the morning if she didn’t go out with Landry Jones. For the rest of her life, she would think of him, actually building him up in her memory—if that were possible—and always wonder what might have been.
She stopped walking up the block and turned, blinking as she looked back. The BMW hadn’t moved but she could hear the purr of the engine. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness she saw that a man was standing beside the driver’s side talking to Landry.
Now was her chance to just disappear. Take the coward’s way out. Run!
Funny, but that’s exactly what her instincts told her to do.
Pop! Pop! The sound took her by surprise. She stared, unable to move even when she saw the glint of a gun through the windshield, saw the flash as Landry Jones fired two more shots.
The man next to the car staggered back, slammed into the wall and slid slowly down, his head dropping to his chest.
Poleaxed, she stared at the dead man—her first dead man—her mind screaming: Landry shot him! He shot him!
She felt Landry shift his gaze to her and suddenly she was moving, kicking off her high heels and running for her life. She could hear the roar of the BMW engine as he came after her, the headlights washing over her.
A main street was only two blocks away. She could see the lights of the traffic. There would be people around. She could get away, get help. But she knew she would never reach it. The BMW was bearing down on her.
She glanced back and blinded by the headlights didn’t see the man with two dogs on leashes appear out of the darkness off to her right.
The man avoided crashing into her, but she got caught up in the dogs’ leashes and went down hard.
“Are you all right? I’m sorry I didn’t see you,” the man said, sounding distraught as he knelt be
side her.
“Help me,” she cried, not yet feeling the pain. “He’s going to kill me.”
“Who?” the man asked, glancing around.
She managed to sit up, vaguely aware that her hands and knees were scraped raw from hitting the sidewalk. The street was dark. No BMW. No Landry Jones.
Three sets of eyes stared at her at ground level, only one set human. The dogs were big and wonderfully muttlike. The man knelt next to her, looking scared and upset.
Willa began to cry. “That car that was chasing me….”
“It went on past,” the man said.
Her hands and knees began to ache and she saw that her dress that she’d bought especially for the showing was ruined. Her new shoes were back down the street where she’d kicked them off.
“Are you sure the car was chasing you?”
One of the dogs licked her in the face. She put her arm around its neck, hugging it tightly for a moment before she dug her cell phone out of her purse and punched in 911.
CHAPTER THREE
Landry couldn’t believe how badly things had gone. What a nightmare. Simon was dead. So was Zeke. Zeke.
He put his head in his hands. What the hell had happened?
Unfortunately, he knew the answer to that, he thought as he gingerly touched his side. He’d been lucky. Although the wound had bled like hell, it hadn’t been life threatening. Still, he’d had a hell of a time finding a doctor to stitch him up and make sure it didn’t get infected. It wasn’t like he could just walk into an emergency room. By law, doctors were required to report gunshot wounds.
He’d had to find a doctor he could trust not to turn him in. He couldn’t chance using Freddy D.’s or any of the ones the cops knew about.
The wound, though, had turned out to be the least of his problems. Since that night, he’d been a hunted man. Willa St. Clair’s eyewitness testimony that he’d shot Zeke Hartung down in cold blood had every cop on the force and the feds after him—not to mention Freddy D. and his boys.
For days Landry had been on the run, keeping his head down, but he’d known from the get-go that he couldn’t keep this up. He had to find that damned disk. The proof he needed was on it. Without the disk, he was a dead man.
He’d come close to getting the girl—and in the long run, the disk. He still had a few friends on the force he could trust, ones that wouldn’t believe he was a dirty cop, even if he was, and one of them had given him the safe house location where Willa St. Clair was being held.
Unfortunately, Freddy D.’s men must have had an inside source as well because they hit the house before Landry could.
He’d almost had Willa St. Clair, though. He’d been so damned close he’d smelled the citrus scent of her shampoo in her long blond hair. But she’d managed to get away from not only him, but also Freddy D.’s men. The woman had either known about the hit on the safe house or she was damned lucky.
Like the night of her art show. If that fool with the two dogs hadn’t come out of nowhere, Landry would have caught up to her, got her into the car and he’d have the disk by now and be calling the shots instead of running for his life.
But she’d seen him kill Zeke and he had known getting her into the car that night would have been near impossible if she’d been alone. Landry was good but he couldn’t have taken on the guy with the two big dogs, too. And Freddy D. had said T and Worm would be nearby. If they’d seen him kill Zeke, then he couldn’t be sure what those two fools would do.
He would be sitting behind bars right now or dead if he hadn’t gotten the hell out of there.
So he’d disappeared into one of the small old-fashioned motels along the beach, blending in as best he could with the tourists, waiting for his cell phone to ring with news.
Since the safe house hit, he’d been hot on the trail of Willa St. Clair. His one fear was that someone would get to her before he did. There was no way she would last long out there on her own. That’s why he had to get to her first. It was now a matter of life and death. His.
His cell rang. He took a breath, hoping that one of his cop friends he could trust had come through for him. But Zeke had friends too, friends who were taking his death personally and would shoot first and ask questions later if they found Landry.
“Hey,” he said into the phone.
“This may be nothing…but I ran her cell phone. Willa St. Clair made a couple of calls. You want the numbers?”
Landry closed his eyes and let out the breath he’d been holding. “Oh, yeah. I owe you big-time.”
“Yeah, you do.” His friend read off the numbers. One in Naples. The other in South Dakota.
He hung up and tried the Naples one first. An answering machine picked up. She’d called a law firm? He almost hung up but heard something in the recording that caught his attention.
“…if you’ve called about the apartments on Cape Diablo island…”
Cape Diablo? Where the hell was that?
Five minutes later, a Florida map spread across the table in his motel, Landry Jones found Cape Diablo in an area known as Ten Thousand Islands at the end of the road on the Gulf Coast side almost to the tip of Florida.
The only other call Willa St. Clair made had been to South Dakota to probably friends or parents. So he was betting she’d rented one of the apartments on Cape Diablo.
Landry couldn’t believe his luck. The woman was a novice at this. Plus she had no idea about the type of people after her. Or the resources they had at their disposal. She thought she’d found herself the perfect place to hide, did she? Instead, she’d just boxed herself in with no way out.
* * *
WILLA PULLED the baseball cap down on her now short curly auburn hair and squinted out across the rough water. The wind blew the tops off the waves in a spray of white mist. Past the bay she could see nothing but a line of green along the horizon.
She glanced at the small fishing boat and the man waiting for her to step in. He called himself Gator, wore flip-flops, colorful Bermuda shorts and a well-worn blue short-sleeved vented fishing shirt. His skin was dark from what he professed had been most of his fifty-some years in the south Florida sun.
“You want to go to the island or not?” he asked, seeming amused by her uncertainty.
“Maybe we should wait until it’s not so rough out there,” she suggested.
He laughed and shook his head. “We wait, the tide will go out and there is no going anywhere until she comes back in. You want to wait until the middle of the night?”
She didn’t, and this time when he held out his hand she passed him the two suitcases and large cardboard box, containing what was most precious to her.
He set everything in the bottom of the boat and reached for her hand. She gave it to him and stepped in. The boat rocked wildly, forcing her to sit down hard on the wooden seat at the front of the boat. “I haven’t been in a lot of boats.”
“No kiddin’,” he said, and started the outboard, flipping it around so the boat nosed backward into the waves.
She grabbed the metal sides and hung on.
“Might want to put on that jacket,” he said as he tucked a tarp around her large cardboard box. “It could get a little wet.”
A slight understatement. A wave slammed over the bow half drowning her in cold spray. She heard a chuckle behind her as she let go to hurriedly pull on the crumpled rain jacket he’d indicated, then drew a life preserver on over that. Both smelled of dead fish, and not for the first time, she wondered if this wasn’t a mistake.
The boat swung around and cut bow first through the waves. Gator gave the motor more power. She gripped the seat under her as the boat rose and fell, jarring her each time it came down. She was glad she hadn’t taken Gator’s advice and eaten something first.
As they started across the bay, she turned to glance back at Chokoloskee, afraid she hadn’t been as careful as she should have.
The wind snapped a flag hanging from the mast of a small sailboat back at the dock. The hal
f-dozen stone crab fishermen she’d seen mending a large net on the dirt near one of the fish shacks were still hard at work. Several of the men had been curious when she’d walked down the dock to talk to Gator, but soon lost interest.
There was no one else on the docks. No new cars parked along the street where she’d hired Gator to take her out to the island. She tried to assure herself that there was no way she’d been followed. But it was hard, given what had happened while she’d been in protective custody.
Landry had found her in what was supposed to be a safe house with two armed policemen guarding her. She’d been lucky to get out alive. From the shots she’d heard behind her, the two men guarding her hadn’t been as lucky. She didn’t kid herself. Landry was after her.
Especially now that she was on her own, unarmed and running for her life. Nor did she doubt that the next time he found her, he’d try to finish what he’d started back at the safe house.
That’s why she couldn’t let him find her. Even if it meant doing something that she now considered just as dangerous.
The green on the horizon grew closer and she saw that it wasn’t one large island but dozens of small ones, all covered in mangrove forests.
Gator steered the boat into what looked more like a narrow ditch, just wide enough for the small fishing boat. As he winded his way through one waterway after another past one island after another, she tried to memorize the route in case she needed to ever take a boat and get to the mainland on her own.
It was impossible. When she looked back, the islands melded together into nothing but what appeared to be an unbroken line of green. She couldn’t even see where the water cut between the islands anymore.
Tamping down her growing panic that she’d jumped from the frying pan into the fire, she told herself she’d picked this island because it was hard to find. She’d wanted remote, and what was more remote than an island in the area known as Ten Thousand Islands along the Gulf side of the southern tip of Florida?
She’d heard about Cape Diablo through another artist she’d met. The woman, a graphic designer named Carrie Bishop, had rented an apartment in an old Spanish villa on the remote island. That’s the last she saw of the artist but she remembered the woman telling her that the area had always been a haven for smugglers, drug runners and anyone who wanted to disappear and never be found.