The Rich and the Dead

by Liv Spector

  Johnson had one credit card that he used regularly. Pulling up those records, Lila noticed that there were frequent charges made to a bar in Little Haiti. She knew the place—a dive familiar to any cop who worked that beat. It was too late to go there tonight, but she’d stake the place out tomorrow.

  ON CHRISTMAS NIGHT, Lila drove by Shane Johnson’s local bar. Sure enough, he was there, sitting at the bar by himself. He had seen her as Lila Day, and though she was back to looking like Camilla Dayton, she didn’t dare go inside. Instead, she sat watching him from her idling car for three hours until he stumbled out into the night. She got out of her car and followed him, careful to keep a conservative distance though she suspected he was too drunk to notice her.

  He walked west for three blocks until he arrived at a small run-down bungalow on a trash-strewn block: Northeast Sixty-Fourth Street. The red Pontiac was parked outside.

  “I see you,” Lila said softly as he unbolted his front door. “I’ve got you now.”

  CHAPTER 35

  IT WAS THE day after Christmas. There were seven days left until the Star Island massacre would take place. After so many dead ends, Lila ’s case had momentum. Shane Johnson must have been hired by Effie to assassinate her fellow society members. Lila still hadn’t figured out Effie’s motive, or what would go wrong, but she knew she would continue to wait and watch and build her case. Just not today. Today, something else was taking priority.

  Dylan.

  On this day, Dylan Rhodes would be shot in front of a convenience store on Lenox Avenue around 2:00 P.M. But Lila had decided that this was not going to happen, consequences be damned. She was going to save the man she loved.

  She was surprised by her own conviction. Once she’d made up her mind, no other choice seemed possible.

  Stopping the shooting wouldn’t be all that difficult. She just needed to make sure she was with Dylan all day, and never let him get near the corner where his life would be forever altered by one terrible moment.

  At first, when she’d suggested they spend this day together, Dylan had objected. But she refused to take no for an answer. Finally, they agreed that he would pick her up in the morning and they’d go to the Sunset Harbor Yacht Club, where Dylan kept his boat. They’d spend the entire day sailing down to Boca Chita and back.

  She’d be with him. She’d keep him safe.

  At 10:30, Dylan pulled up in his silver Mercedes. The main house was empty. Effie had left the day before for New York, to spend Christmas with her father and his family. Or at least that’s what she had told Lila, who needed to continually remind herself not to believe one word Effie said.

  Lila ran out to greet Dylan, holding a small, cheerfully wrapped package. He got out of the car and swept her up in his arms. He held her close for a very long time, as if they’d been apart for months and not a week.

  When she pulled away from his embrace, she saw his face was shadowed with worry.

  “Everything okay?” she asked. Silently, he nodded yes, but his grim expression went unchanged.

  Lila was anxious to get Dylan away from the streets of Miami. Never before had she been so eager to get out on the ocean.

  They drove, top down, across the causeway, then north up Alton Road. Lila tried to get Dylan to talk, but he seemed uncharacteristically quiet. She hoped he wasn’t upset with her about anything.

  When Dylan turned right on Sixteenth Street, and then made a left on Lenox, Lila began to panic. This was the street where, if fate had its way, he would be shot.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, her voice shrill with nervousness.

  “There’s a liquor store up here at the corner. I just want to grab some champagne for us, for the boat ride.”

  “No!” Lila shouted. “I mean, we don’t need any, it’s fine, let’s just go.” She was babbling and she knew it, but she couldn’t help it.

  Dylan looked at her with concern. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  He pulled the car over at the corner of Lenox and Seventeenth Street. Lila looked at the clock. It was 11:18 A.M., a little less than three hours before the shooting would take place. Someone else would be shot today, she tried to tell herself. The culprit wasn’t anywhere near here yet. But still, deep in her gut, she had a feeling that this was all wrong.

  As if he sensed her concern, Dylan took her face in his hands and kissed her. “Hey,” he said, stroking her hair. “I just want you to know that”—he paused, catching his breath, and she noticed his hands had begun to lightly tremble—“I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” she murmured.

  He kissed her on the lips, then jumped out of the car before she could stop him.

  As she watched Dylan run to the liquor store on the other side of the street, all Lila could think was Please, keep this man safe. Please, keep him safe. She sat diligently surveying the scene, ready to jump out of the car at the slightest sign of danger.

  He disappeared into the store, and then time did something funny for the second time in three months. It stopped. The minutes he was out of sight felt like an eternity. She checked her watch. He’d been in there for five minutes. It seemed too long. She was just about to get out of the car to make sure he was okay when he emerged with a bottle of Veuve Clicquot under his arm.

  She started to wave at him, relieved.

  And just then, a car roared out of nowhere, swerved to the other side of the street, and screeched to a dead stop in front of Dylan. Lila saw that the man driving the car had on a mask. In his hand she saw the metallic flash of a gun. She was so close, but too far to stop it.

  She opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out. The sound of two gunshots blasted through the air. Lila jumped out of the car and started running, the shots echoing in her ears. She bolted across the street, barely dodging a car that swerved to avoid her. With his face covered, the gunman was impossible to identify. All Lila saw as she rushed forward were three red birds tattooed on his left forearm. As she bent down to Dylan, the gunman tore down the road, took a sharp right, and disappeared.

  Dylan lay sprawled in a rapidly growing pool of blood, the neck of the shattered champagne bottle still clutched in his hand. Lila fell to her knees in front of him. All of her surroundings went black. Nothing existed except him and her own all-consuming fear of losing him.

  “Dylan!” she cried. He wasn’t able to respond, but his eyes were open. He was still breathing. Thank God, he was still breathing.

  People began to hover around both of them. What they were saying to her didn’t matter. He was breathing. She heard sirens in the distance. And that’s when she realized she had to go.

  The moment she was connected to an attempted homicide, even as a witness, was the moment her cover was blown. Leaving Dylan as he lay bleeding on the sidewalk was the hardest thing she had ever done. But she couldn’t risk being found out, not when she was so close to catching the killer.

  She leaned down and kissed Dylan on his trembling lips. “I can’t explain,” she whispered into his ear, “but I’ve got to go. I love you. I love you.”

  Then she got up and started running, ignoring the voices from the crowd shouting after her, begging her to stop.

  CHAPTER 36

  IT WASN’T UNTIL her breath gave out that Lila stopped running from the scene of the crime. Then she collapsed on the sidewalk, gasping for air.

  How could it have happened? She had done everything in her power to stop the shooting, but in the end it didn’t matter. Everything she knew about the universe must be wrong. Those grand notions of fate and destiny were real—as real as bullet, bone, and blood.

  An out-of-body sensation overcame Lila as she walked back toward Star Island. Everything felt surreal. Because it was the day after Christmas, there were almost no cars or people on the streets, which heightened her feelings of isolation and strangeness.

  She didn’t have long. If Dylan was conscious enough to give his account of the crime, he’d tell the police that she was an eyewitness. Th
en they’d come looking for her. She couldn’t risk that. She’d have to go underground.

  The walk to Star Island took half an hour. When she got to Effie’s house, she was relieved to see that there were no police cruisers out front—not yet, at least. In fact, the day seemed absurdly serene. The sky was azure blue, with picture-perfect cumulus clouds peppered here and there. The sun was shining and the songbirds were singing sweetly. There was no sign of the tragedy that had just cut her heart in two.

  Lila hurried to the guesthouse. She grabbed two suitcases and quickly stuffed them full of clothes, her computer, her notebooks, her wig, and her gun. She brought the luggage to the top of the driveway, got in one of Effie’s cars, which she would ditch later, and sped away.

  She spent some time just driving, trying to get her head straight. She needed a place to think things through, and she knew that she couldn’t go to any of the high-end hotels in the area. If the cops were looking for her, those were the first places they’d check once they discovered she’d fled the guesthouse.

  Lila remembered a motel in Little Haiti that she knew from her time on the force. It was a dilapidated place built in classic old Miami style, off the beaten track just enough for her to briefly slip into obscurity, gather herself, and plan her next move. The fact that it was close to Shane Johnson’s house made it all the better.

  That night Lila couldn’t sleep. Every time she shut her eyes, she’d hear the gunshots again, and then she’d see Dylan lying helpless and bloody on the pavement. She paced back and forth in her small room, clutching a tumbler of Wild Turkey and trying to wrap her head around how she had, once again, failed.

  Throughout the night, Lila monitored the local news channels and websites, hoping to get some word of Dylan’s condition. One story on the eleven o’clock news caught her attention. It mentioned a police search for a suspect in a shooting that had taken place on the corner of Ocean Drive and Fourteenth Street. The TV anchor identified the victim as “Willow Morris, a twenty-four-year-old South Beach resident and employee of the Four Seasons hotel.” On the screen was a picture of that doe-eyed mistress of Scott Sloan. The TV anchor continued, “According to eyewitnesses, the shooter fled the scene in a red sports car.”

  It felt to Lila, at that moment, that everyone around her was going to wind up dead.

  It wasn’t until later that there was any news about Dylan. At 2:36 A.M., The Miami Herald posted an article that read:

  Man Shot Outside South Beach Liquor Store

  A Miami man was gunned down on December 26 in what was reported as a drive-by shooting on Lenox Avenue in South Beach, police said.

  The victim, Dylan Rhodes, age 31, is currently in critical condition at Miami General Hospital.

  Officers responded to a 911 call, which reported the shooting just after 11:00 A.M. They discovered the victim had sustained serious injuries. Emergency medical personnel transported him to a nearby hospital, where it was determined he had suffered a gunshot wound to the lower back, according to a police statement.

  No witnesses have come forth, and no arrests were immediately made. The investigation continued into Friday night. “We have no updates at this point,” a police spokeswoman said. “Every angle is being looked at.”

  Mr. Rhodes comes from a prominent Miami family. In 2008, Mr. Rhodes’s father, Jack Rhodes, then CEO of Connachta Co., died, leaving his two sons controlling ownership of his company.

  At this time, no relatives of the victim could be reached for comment.

  Lila compared this article with the one in Teddy’s database. They were identical except for the time of the shooting, which had changed from around 2:00 P.M. to 11:00 A.M.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Lila drove to Northeast Sixty-Fourth Street—Shane Johnson’s house. His red Pontiac was outside. Lila parked a little farther up the street and sat watching his front door. She stayed there for over two hours until he finally left.

  Lila remembered how her old police chief used to tell her, “Good detective work is five percent bravery, five percent intelligence, ten percent stubbornness—and eighty percent patience.” She had seen him proven right over and over again. Cases often went unsolved because most detectives bored too quickly. But Lila, to the ruination of her life, would stick with a case until the bitter end.

  She followed Shane’s car as he headed south, then onto the expressway west toward the Miami airport. He then took a left on West Flagler Street and pulled into the parking lot of Charlie’s Armory, a gun dealership and shooting range. She watched as he got out of his car, removed two sniper rifle cases from his trunk, and went directly to the outdoor shooting range.

  “He’s practicing for New Year’s Eve,” she said aloud, her voice full of rage. She took out her binoculars so she could get a good look at him, checking his forearms to see if he had the tattoo of three red birds that she had seen on Dylan’s shooter. But his arms were bare.

  Lila could tell from the types of guns he had and the expert way he handled them that Shane Johnson was a well-trained killer. She focused the binoculars on his cold, dark eyes, observing that he registered no emotion as he fired off his rounds. This wasn’t a fun day at the shooting range for him. This was strictly business.

  Over the next couple of days, Lila kept close watch on Shane. She learned his routine. The five-mile run in the morning. The afternoons at the shooting range. Evenings in front of the television. Nights at the bar. She never saw him talk to anyone except in a perfunctory way. No one ever dropped by his house. He was as faceless and disconnected from his surroundings as a trained assassin should be. As she watched him, she couldn’t wrap her mind around the fact that Effie Webster, a woman she had, as improbable as it was, considered a friend, was the Star Island killer. Had it been because of what happened with Chase? Or were there other factors? And what went so wrong that New Year’s Eve that Effie herself wound up dead? But more than to Effie, Shane, or anyone else, Lila’s thoughts turned to Dylan. It seemed like she couldn’t close her eyes without picturing him lying on the sidewalk in a pool of his own blood. The weight of her guilt was so intense that it felt, at times, like it would crush her. She called the hospital several times, posing as different relatives, but never succeeded in getting a nurse to give her an update.

  Then, at 5 A.M. on December 30, four days after the shooting and one day before the Star Island murders, Lila decided she couldn’t take it anymore. With her hair tucked up into a baseball cap and oversize sunglasses on her face, she snuck into Miami General to see Dylan.

  She hesitated at the door to his private room, overcome by nerves. How would she explain leaving him bleeding on the street? How could she look at him, knowing that she had failed to save him?

  Taking a sharp inhale, she stepped inside the room, only to gasp when she saw him sleeping. He had an oxygen tube beneath his nose and several IVs hooked into his arm. His skin was pale, and his mouth was slack, slightly open. His breath came in quick bursts, almost as if he was panting in pain.

  Taking her cap and sunglasses off, Lila stood at his bedside, delicately curling her fingers around his. She couldn’t stop the tears from falling down her cheeks.

  “Dylan,” she whispered.

  He stirred, then opened his eyes and looked at her. It took a while for his eyes to focus, but once he knew it was her, he pulled his hand away and turned his face from hers.

  “I can explain,” Lila cried. “Please, let me try to explain.”

  “You left me lying there on the street alone.” Dylan’s voice was small and weak. “I’m lucky to be alive.”

  “I didn’t want to leave you.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” he said. He turned to look at her. “I’ll never walk again. That’s what the doctors say. So, count yourself lucky. You wouldn’t want to be stuck with a paraplegic, would you?”

  Lila put her hand on Dylan’s arm. “I love you. If you can’t walk, so what?”

  “So what?” he spat angrily.

  “That’s not what I m
eant. I meant that I love you no matter what.”

  “Sure you love me,” he sneered. “Enough to leave me bleeding on the street, surrounded by strangers.”

  “Dylan, I’m sorry. If you just—”

  “Just go,” he said with a painful sigh. “And don’t worry, I didn’t tell the police you were a witness to the shooting. It was them you were running away from, wasn’t it? Or was it me?”

  Lila stood there, speechless. There was so much to say, but the pure anger in his eyes made it impossible for her to speak.

  “Fine,” he said dismissively. “You don’t have to explain.”

  Just then, a doctor walked into the room. “How are we feeling today, Dylan?” he asked in a booming, cheerful voice. Then he saw Lila, with her pale and tearstained face. “Sorry, I don’t think we’ve met,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Dr. Verma, and you are?”

  “Leaving.” Dylan interrupted Lila, who was shaking the doctor’s hand. “She’s leaving.”

  “Yes,” Lila said, sneaking a side glance at Dylan, who avoided her eyes. “I’m leaving.”

  She walked toward the door, then turned to see him one last time. “Good-bye, Dylan,” she whispered.

  Dylan said nothing in return.

  On her way out of the hospital, Lila felt something inside her snap. The man she loved believed that she had betrayed him. He gave his heart to her, and she paid him back by abandoning him. Then, as he lay there in a hospital bed, he asked her to explain herself, and she was too busy drowning in her lies to speak.

  Who had she become? In pursuit of the Star Island killer, she’d ended up hurting far more people than just herself. Lila got in the car and slammed the door, blinking back tears. She’d had enough. She was sick of all the lies, of the charade. It was time, once and for all, to end this. It was time to confront Effie.