She walked up the stairs, careful not to look back in his direction, and pulled open the heavy sliding glass door. The rush of cold air hit her and the suddenness of going from bright sun to dim interior light had her fumbling for a few seconds before she could see clearly.
When her eyes adjusted, panic set in. She instantly recognized the massive tattooed dude that had bowled her over outside of Drunken Jack’s sitting on the couch.
“G’day,” he said, “wheyah’s ya boyfriend?”
Karah whirled around and grabbed the handle of the sliding door. A bandaged hand thumped on the glass next to her, holding the door shut. She’d been so shocked at seeing the first guy, she hadn’t noticed the second. He was bandaged all over and seeping through in several places. His eye was blood red and swollen and filled with goop. He was missing a couple of teeth on that same side and his right foot was completely covered in bandages oozing a dark purple fluid. Without thinking, she slammed her heel down on his foot and punched him hard in the eye.
The man howled in pain and let go of the door, reaching first at his foot and then his eye. She grabbed the door handle and yanked hard to open it.
“Not so fast,” she heard the bigger man say close by her ear.
She felt his fist grabbing a handful of her hair. He shoved her hard at the door and slammed her head into the glass. Her last thought before she passed out was that she was going to have a black eye when Troy got here ... and she was really pissed about that.
She woke with a throbbing pain around her eye. She could feel it wasn’t too bad—just a little swelling—but it seemed her forehead had taken the brunt of the bash. The room was dark, no windows and only one door. Furnishings were sparse. By the door was a small wooden chair next to a small wooden table with a single bulb lamp without its shade. In the chair was the man she’d recognized from the parking lot at Drunken Jack’s—the huge, wrestler type dude with all the tribal tattoos.
She tried to sit up, but had trouble, suddenly realizing her hands were tied behind her back. They must’ve been bound with some kind of zip-tie as they were raw where the sharp edges of the binding cut into her wrists. Her captor noticed she was struggling and propped her up to sit with her back against the wall. He’d been surprisingly gentle, though quite firm. She wondered if he’d stay that way.
“Right,” he said, sliding his chair around backward to face her and laying his arms across the top of the chair. “Sorry ‘bout the bump ... couldn’t have ya screamin’ ‘cross the beach.”
Karah said nothing. Fear was starting to seep into her mind as she contemplated the situation; locked in what might be a basement room, no windows, hand-cuffed, wearing a tiny string bikini and an imposing kidnapper staring at her. Tears began to pool in her eyes.
“Don’t worry yaself.” The man must’ve seen her distress. “Tell me what ah wanna know and we’ll all be outta heyah in no time.”
Karah shook her head. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Ya boyfriend,” he said, “where is he?”
Karah was confused. What in God’s name did this man want with Corey? She hadn’t dated him in over a year.
“What do you want with him?” she asked the man.
Before she could react, the man’s hand flashed up and smacked the side of her head. She tumbled over and pain shot up her cheek and into her ear. She cried out.
“Ah’m askin’ the questions, skank,” he said and made no move to help her up.
So much for gentle yet firm. Karah’s face was pressed into the cold cement floor and the coolness helped the pain a little. She tasted a trickle of blood on her tongue. As the throbbing slowly subsided, she turned her head to face him.
“I have no idea where he is ... that’s the truth.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s true; we haven’t seen each other for over a year. I mean, if I had to guess, I’d say he’s at home in Alabama.”
“Alabama?” the man asked, “What tha fook are you talkin’ about?”
“I haven’t seen him since last May.” She spit the pooling blood from her mouth.
The man seemed genuinely confused. He pulled a cell phone out of his pocket. Karah instantly recognized Laura’s phone. The case was a custom printed shell with a picture of Laura’s dog, Tyson, on it.
“Where did you get that?”
He raised his hand, preparing to swing again, and she cringed backward into the wall. The blow didn’t come.
“Ah said, I’m askin’ tha questions.”
He clicked and swiped through the phone. Turning the screen to face her, he asked, “Looks ta me like ya saw him yesterday.”
Karah would’ve laughed if she wasn’t lying in a growing puddle of blood from her mouth with her hands zip-tied behind her back in a dark cellar-like room with a massive captor beating her up.
“That’s not Corey, that’s Troy.” She immediately regretted saying it.
“Troy?” the man asked. “Alright then, where tha hell is Troy?”
Troy Clint Bodean was a simple man. He liked to get plenty of sleep, which he’d gotten very little of last night. Back in Afghanistan, there were days on end with no sleep. Then in Vegas, he was up at all hours workin’ the D.J. booth at the Pink Hippo strip club, and fishing boats in Louisiana hadn’t offered much time for rest either. Since he’d come to Pawleys, he’d gotten into a comfortable routine of hittin’ the hammock early and rising whenever he chose. He usually rose just after dawn, but only after a full night of shut-eye, otherwise, he might sleep in until noon.
He felt his ride—the bright orange Creekside Cab—pull onto the causeway and ease down to a slow crawl. Traffic on Myrtle Avenue was light at this hour; most of the runners, walkers and bikers had already had their turn and were probably out on the beach by now.
“Hey buddy,” he said and tapped the cabbie on the shoulder, “you can drop me here.”
A little walk to the house would be good to get his muscles working again.
“Whateva yo pleasure, mon.” The cabbie shrugged and pulled over in one of the gravel driveways.
Troy paid the man and tipped his hat to him. “Gracias, amigo.”
“Ya, mon,” the driver said and backed out and pulled away.
Troy rubbed his eyes and stretched. He took the straw hat from his head and ran his fingers backward through his black hair. He felt old today. He pulled his phone from his pocket and checked his messages—nothing new since Laura had asked him about a coffee. He thought maybe a shower would do him good, wake him up, shake the cobwebs out of his head and give him a chance to change clothes. He clicked out a new text.
-“Gonna hit my place for a few. Grab a shower and some trunks. See you girls shortly.”
-“K. Got coffee, almost back. See you there.”
-“RT.”
Troy settled the cowboy hat back on his head, slipped his Costas on, and started walking. He had no reason to pay any mind to the silver Land Rover that passed him going a good clip over the posted twenty-five miles per hour speed limit, even if the radio was blaring some kind of eighties pop boy band.
Laura Kate Starlington was feeling good. She had the windows of her cousin’s car rolled down and the sunroof open. The crooning of an old group she’d loved screaming for in high school was blasting on the high-end stereo. She took a slow slurp from her chai tea and belted out a few more lines of the song. As the final chorus was fading out, she was pulling into the driveway behind her own car.
She carefully picked up the drink carrier with the three coffees, tucked the pastry she’d chosen for herself into her mouth, and grabbed the phone and keys in her other hand. She clopped up the wooden steps thinking she’d have to kick on the door to get Karah to open it rather than put anything down. But as she reached the top of the stairs, she noticed the door was slightly ajar.
That’s weird, she thought, Karah must’ve seen me coming and opened the door for me. She bumped the door open with her elbow and walked
in.
“Honey, I’m home,” she called around the pastry in her mouth.
Nothing. Dang, is she still asleep?
“Karah, come on down. I got you Starbucks!” she yelled up at the ceiling.
She craned her ear up toward the second floor listening for movement. Still nothing.
“Karah?” she called again while walking toward the small table in the kitchen.
“Ya waistin’ ya time, sweet tits,” said a weasely voice from the other side of the room.
A man who might’ve been trying to impersonate a zombie was leaning against the bar that led into the kitchen. He smelled like a zombie too, but after the initial shock, Laura wasn’t very afraid of the man. He looked like he might fall over at any second. He was bleeding from more than one location, including his eye.
“Number one, who the hell are you?” she demanded, dropping the pastry. “Number two, what the hell are you doing in my house?”
The man grinned, exposing a few gaps in his mouth where teeth had once been. He lurched toward her and she took a step back.
He feigned sadness. “Ah, now c’mon sweetness. You don’t recognize me?”
Her mind flashed back to the night before at Drunken Jack’s. It was the vomit dude who’d gotten into the brawl with the frat guys. What the hell was he doing here? His pretended frown disappeared, replaced with a maniacal, Cheshire-cat-like smile. He lunged at her again, this time getting even closer to swiping his oozing hand across her shirt.
She clicked the phone open. “Stop right there! I’m calling the police.”
“Yeah, that ain’t happnin’, chicky.”
With impossible quickness, the man lunged at Laura and knocked the phone out of her hand before she could hit send. It clattered across the floor and through the open door to the stairs, and Laura heard it thunking down out of reach. She turned to run, but he grabbed her shirt. It tore a little, but didn’t rip through. He had her. He was reaching behind his waist and she saw the glint of metal flash from the barrel of a pistol.
She threw an elbow behind her high and felt it connect with his face. She heard a disgusting crunch and felt like she was hitting the open half of an orange. His grip loosened and he howled.
“Thet’s mah good eye, ya fookin’ bitch!”
Laura didn’t look to see, and instead just jumped for the open door. She bounded through and reached for the knob just as the man was recovering and giving chase. She jerked the door closed as hard as she could and just before it slammed shut, the man reached his hand through. But it was too late, as Laura had pulled with all her might and she saw blood spurt out of the man’s fingers as the door banged hard on them. The top of what might’ve been his middle finger snapped completely off and skittered past her. Ugh, gross, she thought. He yelped like a wild dog from behind the door.
“Shit!! Not mah good hand!”
Laura was already bounding down the stairs, taking them two at a time pausing only for a second at the bottom of the stairs to retrieve the cell phone that had jumped away from her in the scuffle. She hopped into Karah’s Land Rover and suddenly realized she had no keys. She must’ve dropped them back in the house. She heard the man beating on the door and screaming even louder. She jumped out of the car and sprinted out into the street kicking up gravel with every step. She ran straight into the arms of another man who was obviously the weasel guy’s accomplice. Without thinking, she pulled back a tightly grasped fist to punch the man.
“WHOA there little darlin’!”
Laura gasped out her breath and let her fist drop. She was looking at the bluest lensed Costa sunglasses wrapped around the bearded face of a ruddy-skinned man. On top of his head was a straw cowboy hat with a peacock feather stuck in it.
“Troy?!”
“That’s right, and you are?”
She didn’t answer; she just grabbed his hand and jerked him away from her house down the street.
“I’m Laura. Listen, someone’s got Karah,” she said, panting and running as hard as she could. “Kidnappers or something.”
“What the hell?” Troy was doing his best to keep up, but his legs ached a little from the long ride and the walk.
“There’s a man in there,” Laura said, jerking her head back toward her house. “A drunk from DJ’s last night. I think he’s got Karah.”
“A drunk? In Rick’s house?”
“How do you know my father?”
“Your father?”
“Well, my stepfather.”
“Doesn’t everybody know him?”
That was true. Laura looked back, but saw no sign of the creepy man who’d been in her house. When they reached the driveway of the next house, she jerked him toward the car park underneath. A small Chevy S10 pickup truck sat lonely in one of the parking spots. She wondered if anyone was home.
“We can probably break in here and lay low,” she said and pulled Troy up the stairs to the door.
“No need to break in,” he said.
“What? Why?”
He held up his hand, dangling a key chain with two keys and a rabbit’s foot on it. “Cause, I got a key.”
25
Follow The Money
Chesney Biggins blew on his overfull coffee and slurped a whipped cream sip into his mouth, slightly burning the tip of his tongue. Dammit, that’ll hurt for a week. He took another sip, careful to blow on it a little more before drinking it.
Todd had radioed him off of the St. Francis hospital run; apparently all the trouble makers had gone. So, there was nothing to do now but chill on the side of the highway and wait for the next call.
He parked his cruiser under a clump of Palmetto trees and slid his coffee into the cup holder, careful not to spill any.
He opened his laptop and a screen popped up showing a deposit slip. Remembering where he was, he pulled out his yellow pad and scribbled some new notes as he examined the files on the zip drive.
Check out deposit slip at GKCU.
He closed the .jpg of the slip and clicked on the file labeled TCWEdPro.pdf. A two-thousand four-hundred and twelve page document opened. At the top in bold letters were the words:
Tourism Conservation and Wetland Education Project
Chesney had remembered hearing something about that, but he had no idea what it was all about. Under the title in smaller text:
Author: Marianne Deckerton
Co-Author: Rick Hairre
Interesting, he thought as he scrolled down through the document. Wetlands, blah blah blah, richest biodiversity, blah blah blah, sustainable development, blah blah blah ... it went on and on with every environmental buzzword Chesney had ever heard packed into a completely unreadable paper.
He scrolled faster, not even reading the words and hoping something would stand out. Just as he was about to close the document, feeling there was nothing to be learned there, he saw a table of financials. It looked to be what the authors considered a reasonable estimate of what the requested grant should be for this project.
There were seven major headings and about a bazillion smaller headings under those. The larger headings were things like: building environmental awareness, providing direct financial incentives for environmental protection, and minimization of tourism’s environmental impact.
Each line had a number attached to it. Chesney gathered that this was the proposed amount they were requesting for that portion of the project. The bottom line was $7,000,000. Chesney whistled through his teeth. Seems like a lot of dough to protect the wetlands for tourists. He wondered why the government wasn’t footing the bill, but then of course, the environment wasn’t on the top of anyone’s political list right at the moment. He clicked through the last few pages of the .pdf and finally got to the clincher. The last page was literally stamped DENIED in huge red letters and several signatures from different offices in Washington gave their name to the denial.
Chesney picked up his coffee and leaned back. What the heck does all this have to do with anything?
&nbs
p; He wondered if there was anything significant enough in the project to warrant a murder. Doesn’t seem likely. Government grants were boring business and were denied all the time. No one would be murdered for such things. And in the grand scheme of the trillion dollar deficits, seven million dollars seemed like small change.
Chesney clicked the file closed and sighed. “No help there.”
He clicked the next file - IMG_4833.jpg. Chesney blinked in surprise, as it was a picture of Laura. But it wasn’t a personal snapshot that someone would take of their step-daughter; it looked like a surveillance photograph. She was clearly unaware the picture was being taken. Chesney recognized the photograph’s surroundings as the outside of Lee’s Inlet Kitchen—where Laura worked during the day.
“What the hell is going on here?” Chesney muttered and took another sip of coffee.
We’ve got a deposit of half a million going to a random account, a denied grant for some kind of ecological tourism project, and a picture of Laura. It felt like a puzzle with pieces that didn’t look the same or fit together. Chesney was baffled.
He opened the last file - VNHSBC002-08171971-47.pdf, and warning bells began to go off in his head. It was a .pdf of a cashier’s check. As he looked at it, he still didn’t know how all the pieces fit together, but he knew something sinister was going on.
Oddly, the cashier’s check did not have a payee listed, that blank was ... well ... blank. The guarantor of the check was CPM via The Traditional Department of The Interior of South Carolina. And the coup-de-grace ... it was made out for you guessed it: Seven. Million. Dollars. Chesney sat his coffee down and looked out the windshield of his cruiser.
“What the hell ... ” He tapped his finger on the side of the laptop.
A thought snapped into his head and he looked back at the list of files. Deposit slip for half a mil, but no deposit slip for the seven million. He looked at the date ... shit, one week before Rick was found. Something that sounded like a bad episode from one of those cop shows began to form in Chesney’s mind.
The Complete Troy Bodean Tropical Thriller Collection Page 21