by Amy Vansant
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.
“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 se
cond 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 resumed 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.”
“No. That’s what I’m thinking. I think someone noticed Ryan. But why did they go to his house to grab him? Why didn’t they just grab him during one of his visits to their neck of the woods?”
“Maybe they thought he was a cop? That he had a partner watching somewhere near by?”
“Maybe. Heck, for all we know maybe he is a cop.”
Charlotte ran out of photos and began to search through the phone for anything else that might be useful. She’d just noticed a few voice messages when the phone went black.
“Shoot. I ran out of juice.”
“Well, you made some good progress. Now you know Ryan is probably the victim of his own attempt at vigilante justice. Or a cop.”
Charlotte sighed. “And probably dead.”
Chapter Thirteen
Charlotte and Declan cruised the dirt road that led to Jackie’s club. Seamus had told them to watch for a bullet-riddled alligator crossing sign standing on the side of the road, twenty feet from the entrance.
Handy and disturbing.
The club came into view, a large square building with a covered parking area attached to one side. A darkened neon sign hung over the only visible entrance. Charlotte could make out the outline of what looked like a disco dancer with his finger pointing to the sky. His opposite hand rested on the small of his arched back, as if he’d just pulled something and had reached for the pain. Beside him, it read, Slipped Disc’o.
“I don’t see Seamus’s car,” said Declan. They circled the club and parked on the opposite side. “That figures.”
Charlotte gathered Mariska’s charge cord and Ryan’s phone, figuring she could glean a few more insights from the phone on the way back home.
They headed inside to find Jackie cleaning a whiskey glass, standing behind an ornate, dark-wood bar. Her head snapped up and she put a hand on her chest.
“Oh jeeze, I didn’t hear you drive up. You scared me.” Jackie tucked away the glass and walked to the opposite side of the bar. “Where’s Seamus? He said he might bring you along.”
“Your guess is as good as ours,” said Charlotte.
Jackie shook her head, smiling. “That man would be late to his own funeral.”
Declan’s mouth hooked to the right. “I think he was once. Have him tell you that story.”
“Do you mind if I plug in this phone? It’s dead and I need to juice it.”
“Oh sure, give it to me. There’s a plug right behind the bar here.”
Jackie plugged in Ryan’s phone while Charlotte’s and Declan’s gazes swept the disco. A large dancefloor complete with a DJ stage occupied most of the center of the enormous building. Wooden benches and booths flanked the center. Her impressive bar occupied most of the right wall. A disco ball the size of a small planet hung from the ceiling, and in the shadowy recesses of the room, Charlotte spotted gun-shaped equipment awaiting the chance to fill the room with laser beams and disco-ball-refracted sparkles.
She whistled. “This place is pretty impressive.”
Declan nodded. “It’s bigger than I imagined.”
“It used to be a shipping depot of some sort,” said Jackie, overhearing Declan’s comment as she returned to them. “The company went out of business, someone tried to turn the building into a dance club and failed, and then I bought it for a song.”
Charlotte grunted. “Not a big surprise it went out of business. This isn’t the most accessible location for a trucking company or a bar.”
Jackie grinned. “But it’s a great location for an underground club.”
Declan clapped his hands together. “So what’s up? Seamus asked me to swing by and help him with some trouble.”
Jackie lifted a hand to her cheek, head shaking. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m overreacting. But too many things are happening all at once.”
“Like what?” asked Charlotte.
“For one, I keep finding dead animals on the property. A skunk, an armadillo...they look like they were hit by cars, but they’re not being hit in the parking lot. It’s like someone is finding them on the road and bringing them here.”
“Maybe an animal is dragging them here?” suggested Charlotte.
Declan nodded. “Or kids. It sounds like a kid’s prank.”
Jackie swept a hand through the air. “There aren’t any kids around here for miles. The ones old enough to drive out here have other things on their minds than leaving dead skunks on my doorstep.”
Charlotte clucked her tongue. “I’d find it odd if a kid nowadays looked up from his phone long enough to pull a prank.”
“Exactly,” agreed Jackie, chuckling.
Charlotte found Declan staring at her.
“What?”
“You know you’ve been living in Pineapple Port so long, you sound like a retiree, right?”
Laughing, Charlotte felt an e
mbarrassed flush spread across her cheeks. She knew it was true. “Anything else?”
“A lot. Twice, men have come asking to buy the place. The first were real slick-looking, lawyerly—all fancy suits and smiling faces. When I turned them down they were nice about it. The second two...” Jackie grimaced.
“Scary?”
“Very scary. Like something out of a crime movie. One man looked Hispanic, but he had strawberry-blond hair that didn’t seem to go with the rest of him. His friend was muscly and didn’t do anything but stare. When I turned them down, they told me their boss wouldn’t be pleased.”
“Did they say who their boss was?”
Jackie shook her head. “That’s what I’m afraid of… that phase three is meeting the boss.”
“Do you know why they want the place?” asked Declan.
“No. They never say. I asked them, but they ignored me.”
A phone rang and Jackie glanced behind her.
“That’s the office phone. It’s probably Seamus letting me know he’ll be late. Come back with me. I have some papers I found in the parking lot that I think the second lot of visitors dropped. There might be some information you can use to figure out who they are.”
Declan and Charlotte followed Jackie to the office. By the time they arrived, the phone had stopped ringing. Jackie shrugged.
“He’ll try my cell if it was him.”
She rustled through some papers and retrieved a yellowing, folded sheet of thick paper. Unfolding it, she laid it out flat and tried to smooth it with her palm.
“It looks like a map,” said Declan.
Charlotte nodded. “But it’s so scribbly. All these connected boxes on this side...and look at this long stripe that goes to—what does that say?”
Declan squinted. “Does it say something? I’m not sure that’s even writing.”
Charlotte looked up at Jackie. “Are you sure the men dropped this?”
“No. Could have been anyone. It just happened to show up on the same day, so I kept it. Do you want to see the skunk?”
Charlotte laughed. “No, I think we’re good. I don’t think fingerprints stick to skunks.”
Declan straightened. “Did you hear that? Sounded like a car door.”
“Seamus,” said Jackie.
She sounded relieved.