by Amy Vansant
“My phone works fine.”
“When I send you photos they show up as Chinese characters. That’s not how that’s supposed to work.”
Mariska grunted. “Want some sausages and peppers? Declan, have you had my sausages and peppers?”
Declan looked up from where he sat beside Charlotte. “I have. And I’d love to, but we need to get to Jackie’s club—”
Charlotte’s elbow jerked against Declan’s ribs and he stopped short with a tiny oof.
Mariska’s brow wrinkled. “Did you say Jackie’s club?”
“Uh, hm? I think I left my car running. Just a second...” Declan grabbed his keys from the counter, flashed Mariska a smile and dashed from the house.
Mariska watched him go and then focused her curiosity on Charlotte. “Did he say Jackie’s club? What does that mean?”
Charlotte sighed. “You know I can’t tell you or you’ll tell everyone.”
“I will not.”
“You told me what I was getting for Christmas every year, days before I could open my presents.”
“You wanted to know.”
“Of course I wanted to know, but you’re supposed to not tell me.”
“I didn’t let you have them until Christmas.”
“I got my ten-speed bike on Thanksgiving.”
Mariska huffed. “That doesn’t count. It was too big to keep hidden. You were a very inquisitive little girl.”
Charlotte sighed. “Fine. I’ll tell you, but only because if I don’t you’ll go around asking about Jackie’s mysterious club until everyone in Pineapple Port is trying to figure out what you’re talking about.”
Mariska’s expression didn’t change, so she continued.
“Jackie has a secret dance club.”
Mariska’s eyes grew wide. “At her house?”
“No, out in the woods thirty minutes or so from here. It’s a disco for older people.”
“Why didn’t she ever tell me?”
“She didn’t want anyone in Pineapple Port to know. Remember, her husband was a slum lord—she doesn’t want her neighbors thinking she’s shady, too. Plus neighbors are a pain.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Charlotte sighed. “You know. It’s a bar. There’s always complications when alcohol is involved. She didn’t want her neighbors to get into fights and end up mad at her. I imagine she didn’t want you all plying her for free drinks, either.”
Mariska’s chest puffed. “I would never expect free drinks.”
“Mm hm. Anyway, she’s apparently having a little trouble and she asked Seamus for help, who in turn asked Declan.”
“And you’re going, too? What kind of trouble?”
Charlotte nodded. “Nothing big. Silly stuff.”
Mariska frowned. “Well, you be careful. Those dance clubs are full of drugs.”
“You think if I go there they’re just going to pelt me with drugs?”
“You never know.”
Charlotte checked Ryan’s phone. The ancient piece of equipment wasn’t a speedy charger. She unplugged it from the wall.
“Do you mind if I take this plug?”
“No.”
“Thanks.” Charlotte gathered up the cord and headed for the door.
“Keep an eye on your cocktail if you drink at the club. Don’t drink any rooskies,” Mariska called after her.
Charlotte paused. “It’s rufies, and this is exactly what Jackie was afraid of. I’m sure the club isn’t scary. It’s a disco for old people.”
“Oh.”
Charlotte barely had the time to put her hand on the knob to leave before Mariska called out again.
“Stay away from the dirty old men!”
Chapter Ten
Mariska crawled onto her bed to peer out the window facing the street. She heard the toilet flush and her husband, Bob, stepped out of the bathroom.
“Did I hear Charlotte?” he asked.
Mariska nodded and watched as Declan and Charlotte pulled from her driveway and drove away.
“What are you doing?”
Mariska crawled backwards off the bed. “Nothing.”
Bob turned and strolled from the bedroom, muttering under his breath. “I swear you get weirder every day.”
Mariska opened her flip phone and dialed Darla.
“Hello?”
“Darla, Jackie has a bar dance club disco.”
“What?”
Mariska cast a furtive glance down the hall. She made a little cave with her hand over her mouth and the phone to be sure Bob couldn’t overhear.
“Jackie has a bar dance club disco,” she whispered.
“What’s a bar dance club disco? And why are you whispering?”
Mariska heard the familiar creak of the front door. Bob had wandered outside to do his afternoon chores. Creeping deep into the living room, farthest away from the garage where most of the afternoon chores occurred, Mariska lowered in her comfy Laz-E-Boy.
“Charlotte told me Jackie owns some sort of dance club disco with a bar out in the forest.”
“You mean a booze bar? That kind of bar? Out in what forest?”
“I don’t know. She said it’s out in the woods.”
“You mean out in the swamp.” Darla fell silent and then continued, sounding more irritated than she had a moment before. “Why wouldn’t Jackie tell us she had a booze bar in the swamp? That sounds like a hoot.”
“Charlotte thinks she doesn’t want us to think poorly of her.”
Darla snorted. “I think poorly of her because she didn’t tell me she had a booze bar. I could have saved a fortune on drinks.”
Mariska pursed her lips, realizing Charlotte might have had a point about neighbors expecting discounts.
“When is it open?” asked Darla.
“I don’t know. Charlotte and Declan are on their way over there now. Jackie needed something and they’re helping Seamus do whatever it is.”
“Hm. We should go there.”
“But they’d see us.”
“That’s the point. We’ll confront Jackie for keeping her secret.”
“Confront her?”
“Not mean-like. We’ll just go when we know she’s there, so she can’t pretend it isn’t there, because we know it’s there and there are witnesses.”
Mariska considered Darla’s logic. “And it’s daylight now so it might be easier to find...”
“Good point. We don’t want to end up hip-deep in alligators.”
“I thought the pythons ate all the alligators.”
“I think it depends on the day of the week.”
Mariska sprang to her feet and then sat again, realizing she still didn’t know where the club was. “Tell you what...I’ll pick you up in fifteen minutes. I need time to find out where the club is exactly. What should we wear? Should we wear dance clothes?”
Darla laughed. “Dance clothes? Like what? A tutu?”
“No, I was thinking maybe I should wear something nicer than shorts though.”
“Hmm. I see what you’re saying. She might have afternoon dancing.”
“I wonder how we can find out what to wear.”
“We’d know if she invited us.”
“Exactly. I think we should wear something a little warmer because she probably has the air conditioning up so the dancers don’t get sweaty.”
“That’s a good point.”
“Okay, I’ll see you soon.”
Mariska disconnected and scurried to the bedroom to put on her stretchy slacks. They looked nice and she could move in them, just in case she had to dance. She swapped her every day scoop-neck tee for a matching flowing black-and-white blouse, and, feeling too staid, added a chunky bright lime necklace. Slipping into shiny black flats, she opened her underwear draw and felt beneath her bras. Her fingers touched plastic and she retrieved the object she’d hidden there.
Her smartphone.
Day to day she still used her flip phone—still suffered Charlott
e’s ribbing for owning such an archaic piece of technology—because she didn’t want Charlotte to know she’d bought a smart phone.
More specifically, she didn’t want Charlotte to know why she’d bought a smart phone.
The fancy phone sprang to life and Mariska clicked on the locator app.
She’d bought it, because smart phones could track your loved ones.
Mariska smiled as the glowing dot representing Charlotte appeared on her screen.
It had taken Mariska two tries, fiddling with Charlotte’s phone when she wasn’t looking, but she’d managed to connect the two phones.
She could find Charlotte anywhere.
If that girl thinks she’s going to become a private detective without someone keeping an eye on her, she has another thing coming.
Mariska touched up her makeup, grabbed her purse and headed outside.
Bob sat on the cement fiddling with the golf cart battery. He looked up at her as she opened her car door.
“Where you going all gussied up?”
“Darla and I are going shopping.”
He rolled his eyes as she slid into her Volkswagen and waved at him through the window.
Chapter Eleven
It was time to quit.
Stephanie couldn’t live with her own hypocrisy anymore. She’d made a little progress. She’d been determined to turn over a new leaf of sorts, but she couldn’t kid herself any longer. Momma’s serial killer DNA was having too much fun working for Louis. Killing bad people for a bad person wasn’t putting the “heal” in double-helix any time soon.
She had to stop.
Declan wouldn’t consider her current occupation in the gray area as a win. She wished she could stop thinking about him. She’d realized too late there was something about that tall, dark handsome man—their history, the way he knew her—she needed him. He kept her stable.
He’d always been her favorite pet. Pets weren’t supposed to stray. Like a good dog, he was noble. One only had to meet his do-gooder, wannabe detective girlfriend to know he was attracted to the light. Once he’d run around the jungles of Columbia battling drug cartels with her—now he preferred loping around with Princess Sunshine and the Golden Girls.
Sad. I need to save him from himself.
She’d thought working for Louis culling a rival drug crew could make her rich and satiate her bloodlust. No one could hold it against her for killing drug dealers, right? She was a white hat, now.
But what had started as a tiny itch at the back of her brain was becoming impossible to ignore.
Killing low-level drug peddlers was like shooting fish in a barrel. She’d killed more losers in the last two weeks than she had the whole year previous. That would be the opposite of progress.
But was it all bad?
She smiled to herself, remembering the wreath of fingers she’d hung on the door of the last surviving rival kingpin’s captains. It was a small wreath. Sixteen digits, generously spaced. The urban legends she heard about herself had it described as a full-sized wreath, but that would take a lot of fingers.
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 dis
posed 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!”