“So could you,” Jacquie said quietly, her brown eyes liquid with concern.
Chris swirled her wineglass. “If Scintella’s the badass everyone thinks he is, why are there only four of you?”
The three DEA agents exchanged glances. At some signal Chris didn’t notice, McLellan said, “We think someone close to the Scintella case is feeding him information about our plans to catch him. He’s slipped away from us twice.”
“The only way he could have done that is if he has someone on the inside,” Russ added. “We’ve been conducting an internal investigation but haven’t turned up anything yet.”
“We’ll get him.” Jacquie tipped her drink toward her as though trying to read some sign left in the glass’s bottom. “The mole’s got to show his hand sometime.”
McLellan nodded. “He will.” He seemed to want to say more, but didn’t.
Silence descended on the table as the waiter delivered Jacquie’s demise in the form of a richly layered and lathered chocolate cake. Russ sipped his whiskey and soda. Jacquie buried her fork to the hilt into the dessert.
After a single bite Jacquie said, “This is spectacular.” She handed Chris one of the extra dessert forks the waiter had brought. “Try it.”
Chris forked a smooth, creamy serving. At the first taste, Chris realized heaven on a plate was nothing. This was beyond heaven. The chocolate shot straight to whatever part of her brain registered ecstasy. “Good Lord,” she said. She turned the fork upside down and drew it slowly from her mouth until she realized McLellan was watching with more than a passing interest. “That was really good.”
“Have another,” McLellan encouraged. “I’m sure Jacquie won’t mind.”
“No, I won’t,” Jacquie said, pushing the plate closer to Chris. “If I have any more I’ll pass out right here.”
“How are the renovations coming?” Russ asked.
“Everything’s done except for having the wall panels in the lower passageway replaced and a wiring problem in the salon,” Chris answered. “I’m checking out some engine trouble we had, but I’m hoping it’ll be a scratch-and-patch job.”
Russ nodded, as if familiar with the term. Even Jacquie seemed undaunted by boating language. Of course, Chris reflected, if you live on a coast, chances are you’ve been on a boat at some point.
She savored the last bite she’d allowed herself and wondered how far she should push McLellan. Hell, it was Natalie’s life at stake and she needed to know how bad things could get on Isladonata. “When are you guys coming aboard?”
“Tomorrow,” Russ replied. “Got my jammies packed and everything.”
“I checked the lat-longs my sister gave me. Isladonata’s inside U.S. waters.” She glanced at McLellan. “Are you planning on hooking up with the Coast Guard?”
“Already done.”
“And you’re not afraid word will get back to the DEA? I mean, if the mole is paying attention, won’t he know what you’re doing?”
McLellan’s fingers rested gently on her shoulder. She wished she’d left her jacket on. It might have suppressed the raw heat that flared in her skin at his touch, the heat that went ice-cold when she thought of the transponder. “It’s okay. I’ve got it handled.”
I wish I could believe you.
Jacquie leaned slightly toward Russ, giving him a nice view of her lovely cleavage. “Let’s go. I haven’t packed my jammies yet.”
“Want some help?” His gaze wandered lazily from Jacquie’s chest up to her eyes.
“You know better than that, white boy.”
Russ rolled his eyes. “Does she always put me in my place or what?” He winked at Chris, telling her the play between him and his partner was just that. “See y’all tomorra.”
“How long have they been flirting heavily?” Chris asked, giving up and dipping her fork once more into the luscious dessert as Russ and Jacquie walked away.
“Years. You’re going to OD on that,” McLellan said in a low voice.
“If I’m lucky I will.”
He let his arm drop around her waist and leaned close. “Looks nice.”
She raised a brow at him, hoping her skepticism would persuade them both she didn’t feel the hot thrill spiking up and down her spine at his touch. “You’re laying it on a little thick.”
McLellan’s rueful half smile admitted defeat, then he leaned in and let his lips brush her ear. “Christina.” He paused, leaned back. “Dammit.”
“What?”
“Pager.” He fished it out of his jacket’s breast pocket and glanced at the screen. “Smitty. Will you be okay while I use the phone?”
“You don’t have your cell?”
“Battery’s dead and I didn’t get a chance to replace it today.” He caught her chin in his hand and lightly kissed her cheek. “I’ll be right back.”
She watched him stride off toward the anteroom where the phone bank was, thinking no man should look that good in slacks and a Hugo Boss jacket that snugged his shoulders. Hugo Boss, which according to Smitty, a DEA agent shouldn’t be able to afford. Never mind. She had death to keep her occupied. She dug the fork into the slim remainder of Jacquie’s dessert.
“Mind if I join you, Ms. Hampton?”
She glanced up, then froze when Eugene Falks slid into the booth.
Chapter 10
“Don’t.” Falks propped his foot against the seat next to Chris, blocking her way, before she could bolt. “Not if you want to see your sister again.”
Chris warily settled back. Falks’s ghoulish face shone under the dim overhead lamplight like a nightmare, his black shirt a stark frame beneath his sharp, white chin.
His mouth thinned into what might have been a smile. “I’m sure she’d be very upset if anything bad happened to you.”
“What do you want from me now?” she asked. Her throat, once rich with chocolate and sweet wine, now felt like sandpaper when she swallowed.
His breath whistled through his teeth as he inhaled. “Mind if I smoke?”
Without waiting for her answer, he stroked a wooden match into flame and lit a long, thin cigarette. He slipped the matchbox into his shirt pocket.
“It’s a shame, really,” Falks said slowly around picking a stray tobacco fragment from his tongue. “Your sister is such a pretty woman.” He squinted at her. “You must take after your mother.”
Chris fought back the panic threatening to rise up and drown her. “Why are you stalking me?” She licked her lips, tried to breathe.
“For shame, Ms. Hampton. I’m not a stalker.” He put one bony fingertip into the ashtray and dragged it toward him. “Your sister tells you all her secrets, doesn’t she?”
She swallowed. “Not necessarily. My sister’s a grown woman—”
“—so she does whatever she wants and then calls you in to help her fix things after she’s screwed them up,” Falks finished. “Common among siblings. And you’re not through saving her yet, are you?” His wide, pale eyes narrowed. “I can’t let you do that.”
“Is that why you tried to kill me?”
“Not kill you. Put you out of commission.”
“Why not just kill me?”
“Mrs. Scintella would have suffered some distress over that event. Mr. Scintella didn’t want to give her an excuse to make more trouble than she already has.”
“But you were searching my yacht when you broke in.”
“Of course I was.” He cast a pitying look at her. “You can’t expect us to ignore Mrs. Scintella’s little deception.”
“What are you talking about?” Chris clamped her hands on the bench seat as if it were a tossing ship’s deck. This must be a nightmare, she thought. It can’t be real.
Falks blew a thin stream of smoke that clogged her already tight throat and stung her eyes. No, it wasn’t a dream or her imagination.
“Let me be blunt. If you and your sister believe you can deceive Jerome Scintella, you’re playing a game you won’t survive.” He raised a whiskery brow at her.
“She merely has to give the money back.”
“What money?”
“Don’t waste my time, Ms. Hampton. Chris, isn’t it?” Falks squinted at her again, his expression almost meditative. “You’re an attractive woman. It’d be a shame to have to kill you.”
“I don’t understand—”
“Bullshit.”
Falks’s mild, vaguely genteel manner sharpened into a hardened, steely edge. He leaned forward, his cigarette ash teetering precariously and casting up a thin spiral of smoke. Chris could see his yellowed teeth between parted lips and the faint pink around his eyes. From the fire extinguisher spray? she wondered abstractedly as she instinctively drew back, out of biting range. McLellan. She had to stall until McLellan came back.
“If you’re telling me she stole money from her husband, I don’t believe it.”
“She made a mistake,” Falks snapped. “Her husband is willing to forgive her if she admits her error. This time.”
“What error is that?” Chris retorted. “Wanting to live her own life without being watched? Wanting to live in peace without wondering when he’s going to hit her next? She doesn’t need his money. She has her own.”
“I don’t see that their domestic issues are your business.”
“She’s my sister. That makes them my business.”
Falks’s sneer crinkled his face like old dough. “Hence my little get-acquainted gesture.”
“Yeah, big man tries to run me down in a powerboat.”
“Maybe I like dancing with pretty girls.”
“Even when they spit in your face?” She deliberately stared at the pinkish skin of his temples. “Leave me the hell alone.”
“Not until you give me the money your sister took.”
“She’s not a thief. Jerome’s delusional.”
“Delusional?” Falks stared at her, then burst out laughing, a hitching, craggy, horrible sound like a dry-heave retch. He plucked a business card from his breast pocket and slid it across the table to her. His long fingers lingered, almost caressing, on the card. “You will bring the money to this address.”
She looked at the card, which was blank but for the street address painstakingly scripted in a spidery, old lady’s handwriting. Then beneath that, Noon. “Why do you think I have it?”
“I know, Ms. Hampton, because I know everything. I know how much money is in her private account and how she spends it. I know where she shops, who she calls, who she e-mails and when she goes to bed at night. I know she’s lately taken to fucking her bodyguard. I know she very recently sent you a box filled with lingerie you’ll likely never wear.” His gaze flicked to Chris’s bare shoulders, groped her breasts. “Unfortunate.” He blinked twice. “I know her accomplice intercepted a courier package meant for her husband and put it in a box addressed to you.”
“You’ve got it wrong.”
Falks leaned back and spread his hands. “Unlikely.”
“Maybe it hasn’t arrived yet.”
“The shipping company assured me it’s in your possession. Now either you can get it for me, or I and some of my rowdier colleagues can come take it from you. They quite enjoy boat rides.” He flicked the cigarette absently with his fingers. “Not to mention the smell of burning fiberglass.”
Chris’s fear edged into anger. Touch Obsession, touch her home, and she’d take it out of his hide.
Falks’s pale eyes crinkled at the corners. “Do me a favor. Ask your sister if she’ll consider changing her mind about leaving her husband.” He tapped ash into the tray’s center with a single fluid motion, like a master painter effortlessly daubing light onto canvas. “Then ask her if she believes she can afford to be so stupid, especially when her husband has…access…to those closest to her.”
Chris’s heart banged her chest wall. Where the hell is McLellan? “I’m sorry my sister ever got involved with him.”
“I’m sure many people feel the same way, but there they are, involved with him.” He drew on his cigarette, his eyes slits in his skull. “Some of them got in over their heads. And a few of them have stayed there, I’m sorry to say.”
Chris’s blood ran cold.
Falks put his cigarette out and delicately balanced the stub on the tray’s edge, aiming it at her. “Remind her that it just takes a little effort to reach out,” his hand darted like a snake to snag her wrist, “and touch someone.”
Chris stifled a scream as his bony fingers bit into her skin, squeezed her wrist bones. He smiled, dark lines beneath the craters of his eyes, his teeth bared like fangs. He smelled of tobacco and cold, damp stones.
“Tell your pretty boy about our conversation and your sister dies. Do you understand?”
She nodded.
“Be on time tomorrow, Ms. Hampton.” Falks abruptly released her, allowed her to breathe again. He slid from the booth, then paused, his brows tipped up in what might have been concern. “Take care you aren’t mugged on the way to our appointment. Thirty million dollars is a lot of cash to be carrying around.”
Stunned, Chris watched him go and tried to breathe. Thirty million dollars? It was all too much to get her brain around. She picked up the business card. Noon. And she had no idea what time it was now because she wasn’t wearing a watch. She stared at the cigarette butt, lying aimed at her like a gun.
She had to get back to Obsession. Tell Smitty and McLellan and get them to help her tear the yacht to pieces to find this thirty million dollars Falks was so confident she had. God. Where could it be? They’d already looked everywhere there was to look.
She glanced toward the phone room. The heavy door was just closing, then she saw a hand catch it and shove it open again. McLellan stepped out and held the door for an elderly black man to enter. Faint cigarette smoke scented the booth. She couldn’t let McLellan know Falks had been there with her.
Then she stopped.
Falks had said not to tell McLellan he’d been there. Did that mean he and McLellan weren’t connected via Scintella? Did Smitty have McLellan wrong? Could Smitty be the mole? But why would Smitty tell that story if it meant he’d implicate himself?
Unwilling to take any chances, Chris hurriedly tucked the business card in her purse, then got out of the booth. First things first. She had to get back to Obsession. If she had to tear the damned boat apart to find the money Jerome Scintella thought Natalie had taken from him, she would.
As she wound through the tables toward McLellan, she tried to breathe and relax her muscles. Stress, anxiety—hell, sheer panic—tied her up in knots inside, but she had to look okay. Just until she got back to Obsession.
“That didn’t take long,” she lied when she reached McLellan. “What did Smitty want?”
McLellan was distracted for a moment while he paid the bill at the bar, then curved his arm around her to guide her to the door. “He got a call from Garza and wanted to update me.”
“Anything new?” Her voice sounded like she’d been strangled.
“Not really.”
They stepped out onto the bustling Bourbon Street, where throngs enveloped the sidewalk and street. The smell of fried seafood and rich gumbo lingered in the night air and behind it, the tang of coming rain. In the distance up ahead, a party gained decibels as it spilled out of a club. New Orleans—irrepressible, iconic—was making a comeback.
“What time is it?” she asked.
His watch glinted in the street light. “Nearly eleven.”
“No wonder I’m so tired.” She smiled, and felt how feeble that smile was, how panicked she must look to him.
“Are you feeling okay?”
“Can we just go to the hotel?”
“You must be exhausted.”
He whistled up a taxi for the short ride. When they got out, Chris tried to pay attention to the wrought iron railings, the bowing crepe myrtles, the freshly clipped and pungent grass of the hotel’s courtyard, but images of Falks swelled inside her mind. Those pasty, ghoulish hands signed the register for their rooms. His pale e
yes stared out from portraits hanging in the hallway. His stale breath wafted into her face when McLellan opened her room’s door.
Chris looked around while McLellan methodically searched the room, checking the closet and bathroom, the balcony.
“Do you want the windows open?” he asked. “There’s no way anyone could get in.”
She nodded, and he opened them. He knew she liked fresh air. And the storm that had followed them along the coast was coming, bringing its copper-penny smell with it.
McLellan grasped her upper arms with his warm, comforting hands and his gray eyes registered a gentle concern, almost protectiveness. He’s not like Eugene Falks at all, she thought. Not a walking corpse. He’d saved her from the engine room and held her and made her feel safe. He wanted her to see a doctor. Loved to sail. She could trust him, couldn’t she?
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“It just caught up with me,” she blurted. “The whole thing with Natalie and the boat. I had everything planned and ready to go, but we hit that oil rig and the accident with the prop shaft and the exhaust and I don’t know if Natalie’s okay and then tonight I had a nice evening and met your friends and it seemed so normal, and then—”
And then she was pulled into his arms, against his hard chest. Chris slipped her hands under his jacket, needing his body’s warmth, to feel the flesh and muscle on his bones beneath the soft cotton shirt, to smell his clean, masculine, living scent. After a moment, she heard him murmuring to her hair: It’s okay, love. I won’t let anything happen to you, Christina. His strong palms pressed her close, stroking her back until she was tempted to believe him.
She began to shake, shaking to pieces. Just like a bent prop. You’re driving along and then something happens and the prop gets bent. You keep trying to go on and go forward but the timing’s off, the balance is wrong, and then the engine shakes itself to pieces, trying to go and go.
“I can’t keep going,” she said against his shoulder. “I have to keep going.”
“I know.” He stroked her hair.
The scene played itself through her brain at high speed—the fear, no, the terror, Falks’s threats, his cold touch. Now here she was, McLellan’s clean scent filling her nostrils, his hands strong on her waist and shoulder. She clung to him like a woman falling from cliffs or airplanes or sanity.
Dead Reckoning Page 14