The Alex Shanahan Series

by Lynne Heitman

  I closed my eyes and tried to picture the kitchen from the inside. “Yes… there is a laundry room or pantry. If we walk in through that door, it will be to our right.”

  “Good. Let’s hope he can’t get out.”

  Jack held his gun in his left hand. I held mine in my right and tried to do exactly what I saw him do. As he reached toward the tarnished doorknob with the handkerchief, I flattened against the wall and breathed, but the air seemed to go somewhere else besides my lungs. He twisted the knob. The lightweight door opened with a pop. It sounded like a starter’s pistol, and my heart began the race.

  “Take the safety off.” His voice was quiet and close. “Don’t touch anything.” He disappeared through the open doorway. Just like that. No deep breath. No moment of contemplation or anticipation.

  My fingers felt too thick, but I reached around and managed to flick the safety off. It made the gun feel different. Hotter. I had to take a contemplative moment to test and make sure all my limbs were working. When I was convinced they would respond when called upon, I started into the kitchen. Then stopped. Confused.

  Ringing. Cell phone ringing. Panic. My cell phone ringing. Clipped to my waistband. Hard to get it open with one gun and two anxious hands. Ringing again, goddammit. Bull out of his mind. Open it. Hit the power button and turn it off. Wait. Sweat. Listen.

  Nothing. Not even Jack coming back to see. Saved by Bull’s raucous din.

  Stale and humid air wrapped around me the second I stepped into the kitchen. And I smelled… I thought I smelled… it had to be. Blood smells like nothing else on earth. Once you smell it you never forget. The rich odor came in though my nostrils, permeated my sinuses, then raced throughout my body, crackling along every nerve ending until I felt the odor more than I smelled it.

  “Stay close to me.” As soon as Jack saw I was with him, he moved forward, through the front room, and toward a hallway where welcome sunlight spilled through the first door we came to. The room was what I think is called a Florida room, complete with full plantation shutters that had been left open. It must have been Jimmy’s junk room because that’s what was in there. Jimmy’s junk looked the same as everyone else’s—cardboard boxes, an old floor lamp bent in the middle, a pile of wadded-up beach towels, and an old toaster.

  The next door led to the bedroom. The only piece of furniture there was the bed. It was made. One room left. If Jimmy was in the house, he was in the bathroom.

  I watched Jack move toward that door and I concentrated on simply reacting to whatever he did. He motioned for me to stay back, then raised the gun and pointed it straight up toward the ceiling, keeping it away from his head. He called out for Jimmy. The only response came from Bull.

  This time he did pause to gather himself, taking a breath as I had done on the back porch, and I wondered what he was contemplating. The scene I was imagining made my insides want to rupture. A gunshot blast. Jack thrown back against the far wall. Down on the floor. Eyes open and unseeing. It was the worst possible image I could think of, conjured up from the fact that I cared about him and I didn’t want to lose him.

  I kept my eyes open, maybe couldn’t have closed them if I’d tried. He swung into the doorway. His face turned pale. He rose from his firing stance and let the gun drop to his side. He leaned his shoulder against the jamb and all the energy drained out until he looked like a coat hanging on a hook.

  I made myself step in beside him, and looked at what he was looking at.

  “Jesus. Jesus Christ, Jack.”

  Jimmy had been taking a bath. His arms, head, and most of his torso hung over the side, but his long legs were still in the tub, mostly submerged. His two kneecaps stuck out like white ice floes in dull red water that was as flat as the mirror over the sink, and now certainly cold.

  Much blood and brain matter had sprayed across the back wall of the tub. More was on the floor, having gushed across the tiles from a large hole in the back of his head. The pool of blood on the tiles was thick with his long, silver hair. Whoever had killed him had probably shot him through the forehead, blowing most of the back of his head off.

  But that wasn’t his only wound.

  His hair was pulled to the side to show the knife, a long knife with a thick, black handle buried to the hilt in his throat. The murderer had plunged it in below his left ear. The bloody tip stuck out the other side, and had lodged against the tub in a way that kept Jimmy’s head twisted at an unnatural angle that left his dead eyes glaring up at us.

  I put my hand over my nose and breathed through my mouth. Jack still hadn’t moved. His hands were trembling, and when I looked into his eyes, I saw pain. I reached out and touched the sleeve of his shirt.

  “He was a soldier.” He pressed his lips together hard. “I hated him. I hated the things he did, but he was a soldier once.” He blinked up at the ceiling, and maybe he was back there in the jungle seeing the sights and hearing the sounds only he could hear, and when he looked at Jimmy again, maybe he was thinking there was one less person in the world who had been there with him. No matter what he had done later, no matter what he had become, Jimmy was one of the men… the boys who had stood next to Jack in a place where no man should ever have to stand.

  He turned and walked down the hall.

  I wanted to be with him but he had walked away from me, so instead I counted nails. Jimmy’s was an old house and all the nails in the floor in his hallway were not flush with the hardwood. Some of them were coming up, making little booby traps, the kind that snagged your hose when you walked around in the morning with no shoes, trying to get ready for work. Or provided something good to stare at when you didn’t want to stare at a bloody corpse. I counted twenty-seven of them. I counted them again. And then I went out to find Jack.

  He was in the front room with his gun in his holster and his hands in his pockets, staring at the trophy for the State Champs of Everglades City, Florida, 1967.

  Bull seemed to finally be running out of steam. His cries were more intermittent now, more mournful and desperate than angry.

  “Are you all right?”

  “He didn’t deserve that. I thought I knew what he deserved, but it wasn’t that.”

  “We should call the cops, huh?” I pulled out my phone and turned it back on.

  He nodded. “Call Patty. Tell her we found the McTavish murder weapon.”

  The screen on my phone was flashing, telling me I had a text message marked urgent. I hadn’t even known I could get those. It had to be from Felix. I had no other friends who were that technologically capable. I futzed around with the buttons until I figured out how to pull it up and scroll through it.

  “Oh, my God, Jack.”

  Chapter Forty-four

  ​Jack had looked bad at Jimmy’s house. He looked worse as he put my phone to his ear and listened again to the voice mail message Felix had left for me. I tried to concentrate on the road. On my hands on the steering wheel. On getting us to The Harmony House Suites as fast as the Lumina would take us. Anything but what had been in that message. And anything but the fact that Felix had been the one calling when I had turned off my phone.

  He had wanted to tell me that Vanessa knew he had been in her system. He’d been “busted,” as he put it, by a superior alarm that he had overlooked—a “hacker trap” that he had never seen coming. He was sure they knew who he was, and was calling to find out what to do.

  Jack was dialing again, as fast as the little cell phone buttons would allow. I knew he was calling the room at The Suites again. He’d been doing that compulsively since we’d walked out of Jimmy’s house. If he hadn’t been doing it, I would have. He pressed the phone to his ear and we both waited. And waited.

  “C’mon, son,” he kept saying. “Be there, kid.”

  The waiting was excruciating. Finally, someone answered, and it wasn’t Felix. It was the hotel operator wanting to know again if Jack wanted to leave a message for room 484. Apparently, no one was home.

  We had no way to ge
t into the suite when no one was there to answer our knock. Jack kept knocking anyway. Banging, really, taking out on the intractable door all the same fears that were pinballing around inside me.

  “Felix,” he yelled. “Felix. Son...”

  The curtains in the room next door moved—someone wondering about all the commotion, no doubt. But nothing from 484.

  “I’m going down for a key,” I said.

  The see-through elevator showed that both cars were on the ground floor. I went for the stairs and flew down four floors. By the time I hit the lobby, I was sweating, every breath had a catch in it, and my mouth tasted as if I’d been swilling milk of magnesia.

  There were three agents at the front desk working a queue. According to one of the bellmen, the smallish, youngish, roundish woman in the middle was in charge. She was the other assistant manager besides Felix.

  “Excuse me,” I said, stepping in front of her.

  “Hey.” A guy with a salesman’s gut and a suit that didn’t fit because of it was fuming behind me.

  “I need your help,” I said quietly to the woman. “It’s an emergency.”

  She seemed stunned and stood blinking at me. “What?”

  “We have an emergency upstairs. I need to get into one of your rooms immediately.”

  “Oh.”

  Still with the staring, and I understood completely why Felix had been named acting general manager of the place.

  “Room 484,” I said, more urgently. “Can you make a key and let me in?”

  She responded by looking down at her keyboard and typing. “That’s Felix’s room.”

  “Yes. We need a key. We need to get in.”

  She turned to the agent working next to her. “Sherrie, I need to help this lady—”

  “Now,” I said.

  She turned and looked at me with stern eyes and a locked jaw.

  “I’m sorry. Please. This is important. Can you just make a key and give it to me?”

  Of course not. After she had made the key, we stood at the elevator and waited because I thought it would be faster than encouraging her up four flights of stairs.

  Jack was on his cell phone when we arrived. It felt as if I’d been gone for an hour. “I called Patty to let her know what was happening. She’s sending some units over.”

  We both stood back and waited as the assistant manager gave the door a dainty rap. “Felix?”

  “Open the damn door now.” Jack must have startled her. She fumbled the key. Almost dropped it. Recovered. Had a tough time sliding it into the slot. It didn’t work the first time. The second time the lock clicked. She pushed the handle down and the door opened.

  “Stay back,” Jack said to her. “Don’t come in here.” He pulled out his gun and I thought she would faint. He walked in first. I went behind him sans weapon because in my haste I’d left mine behind in the car.

  It was dark. Cold. The air conditioner was pumping and the chilled air made me shiver. The sound was faint because the bedroom door was closed. Felix was not in the front room. Most of his stuff was still there.

  “Jack.” He angled slightly to see where I was pointing. “His laptop is gone.”

  “Shit.” He approached the closed bedroom door, checking the bathroom quickly as we passed it. Empty. He pushed back against the wall, put his hand flat on the door, and paused to look down and take a quiet breath. He wrapped his hand around the knob and turned it. I heard the latch release, felt the pop in my chest. A wedge of light slipped through, fell across the durable carpet in the bedroom, and widened as Jack pushed the door slowly open. The sound of the air conditioner seemed deafening.

  The darkness inside the room scared me, not because I thought someone was going to jump us. If Felix had been in there and able, he would have answered. He hadn’t.

  Jack reached in to turn on the light.

  “There’s no wall switch.”

  We both jerked at the sound of the little girl voice behind us. The assistant manager had crept within a few feet without either of us hearing her. The trepidation had gone from her eyes, and now they were burning with a weird light that was beyond innocent curiosity, but not all the way to lurid.

  “Step back,” I said. “Get out of the room.”

  “You have to turn on the lamp that’s on the dresser.”

  “Thank you. Please go out and make sure no one comes in here.”

  While she trundled out, I looked for and found the switch for the light in the ceiling over our heads. When I flipped it on, it threw enough light that we could see the bed where Felix had laid out his notes on Vanessa. They were gone. Jack was inside the bedroom now, and I was just outside the door. He found the lamp. Turned it on. I quickly scanned the room. Nothing. Jack looked on the other side of the far bed. He shook his head.

  One more place to look. He moved to the closet and signaled for me to stand behind him. He rubbed the palm of his right hand against his jeans, and I felt my own palms dripping. He swung the door open, stepped around it, and stood with his gun pointed inside. I couldn’t see around the door. The muscles in his forearms twitched and his face went blank and I felt the temperature in the room drop a few degrees. I pulled the door all the way open.

  The closet was empty.

  Jack seemed to want to lean on something. He used the wall. He holstered his gun, leaned over with his hands on his knees, and took a few deep breaths. I put my hand on his back and leaned on him. His shirt was soaked through, and I could feel his heart working hard.

  “They took him,” he said. “Him, his laptop, and all his notes. They’ve got him. Damn it all to hell.” He straightened up and covered his face with his hands, then let them slide down, as if he could wipe away the ache. I felt it, too.

  “My God,” he whispered. “What did we do?”

  Chapter Forty-five

  The woman in the next room over, the one who had been peeking through her curtains, told us Felix had left with two men and a tall blonde woman about half an hour before we showed up. It was now an hour and a half after that and still no one had called. No ransom demand. No contact of any kind. The working theory, the only one we could stomach, was that Vanessa had snatched Felix and would trade him for the account information. I kept reminding myself that getting rid of Felix while we still had it didn’t make much sense. But it was hard to ignore the next conclusion in that logical sequence—that getting rid of all three of us after she had what she needed made a whole lot of sense.

  Jack and I were in the Lumina, out in the city, trying to stay in motion. Our first stop had been at Jack’s bungalow to pick up more weapons. He was now heavily armed. Next we’d gone to Vanessa’s office. She wasn’t there. We’d checked the garage. All Volvos were in.

  The police had been to her house. Someone had gone to the airfield and checked her Gulfstream. The Crayfish had been found, boarded, and eliminated as a possible refuge. It was hard to eliminate all the possibilities—to even think of all the possibilities for a woman with so many resources.

  In place of conversation, we had the radio. It wasn’t much of a distraction. Constant emergency reports interrupted whatever program we chose to listen to. I couldn’t scan fast enough to avoid them. The wind was due to shift, and the smoke from the largest of the fires nearby would turn by afternoon and blanket the more heavily populated areas to the south and east, which meant Miami and Miami Beach. Small children, asthmatics, and the elderly were warned to stay indoors.

  “Where would she go?” I asked. Again. “Where would she take him?”

  “She has to leave town,” he said, finishing the routine we’d been working over and over. He had his cell phone to his ear, checking his service and my hotel again for messages.

  “I think she has to leave the country,” he said. “When Ottavio finds out Jimmy is an informant, he will have to assume she was in it with him, especially if he finds out she’s been skimming. The smart move is to take the money and go hide. Although, if Ottavio believes she was working for th
e government, there is no place for her to hide.”

  “But why take Felix? I would have given her the disc.”

  “Insurance. We fucked up. We underestimated her.”

  I drove around for another ten minutes or so, retracing parts of the town I had come to know in the past two weeks. Eventually, I was headed back toward the airport.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To George Speath’s place,” I said. “We know he had a connection to Vanessa. He was working for her, in a sense.” He didn’t answer and I wasn’t thrilled about the idea. But it was all I could think of besides the fact that we had to be running out of time.

  They may as well have had a “Going Out of Business” sign posted in the window. Speath Aviation was locked up tight. The hangar door was shut and padlocked. My car was the only one in the dusty, crushed gravel parking lot.

  I peered into the front window of the dark offices. The only movement was from a screen saver on one of the computer monitors. It was a little antique biplane that did acrobatic aerial stunts across the screen. It always pulled up just as it was about to crash.

  “I don’t think anyone’s home, Jack.” I looked around and realized I was talking to myself. From around the corner I heard the sound of glass shattering and plinking to the ground. Jack had found another door around the side—this one with a window—and he had his entire arm inside when I arrived.

  “Doesn’t seem like much security,” I said, “for a place that has parts lying around.” I had begun to grow much more security conscious as I’d learned about bogus parts.

  “Didn’t you tell me this is usually a twenty-four/seven operation?” The door opened. He slipped in and I went after him and closed the door behind us.

  “You’re right. They probably always have someone around.” Which made it particularly strange that no one was there now. “What should we look for?”

  “Let’s start with the files.” He stared at the twelve file cabinets that lined the wall.