by Lowe, Tom
“No problem. Eyes straight ahead.” He smiled, immediately turning his head toward an attractive brunette, dark glasses, white bikini, white smile, lounging on the foredeck of a sixty-foot Hatteras, a pink cocktail in her manicured hand.
“What a time to have a fat lip. I hang with you, Sean, all this hoopla chasing us, and the ladies think I’m a knight, even the married gals.”
“We have more than hoopla chasing us. Let’s lie low for the afternoon. You step back out there and they’ll pepper you with questions.”
“I can’t go on TV looking like this. Plus, I have nothing to say.”
“I told you and Dave about my past with Andrea, that’s enough for them to ask you things that can get twisted. You heard them in the parking lot.”
Dave met us on the dock next to his boat. He shook his head and cut his eyes to the end of L Dock where reporters stood, setting up to do live shots. He said, “I take it you didn’t hit your mouth on the roller-coaster safety bar. Nick, what the hell happened to you?”
I said, “We’ll tell you when we get out of sight of the media mob.”
“By default, you’re putting Ponce Marina on the national map. Next thing you know, after the theme parks, the Space Center, and the beaches, tourists buses will pull through this marina and the driver’s will point out that this is where Sean O’Brien spent weekends on his old boat coming up with ways to take out presidential contenders.”
“It all started when I saw Courtney Burke walking down a long and dangerous road.”
“And look where that road’s led you. Come aboard, gents. The proverbial defecation is hitting the fan.”
We followed Dave onto Gibraltar, and into the large salon, the boat’s tinted windows sure to prevent eyes and cameras from snooping. I sat in a canvas deck chair, Dave on his leather couch. Nick stood at the bar, an ice cube wrapped in a paper towel and pressed against his mouth, dark eyes filled with thoughts.
Dave said, “I’m not sure where to start. We have a media gang at the gate, all now aware that you fathered a child with the woman who might be the next first lady, and you and Nick come back bloodied after visiting Bandini’s camp. So, what happened?”
I filled him in on the events at the carnival, who the players were, and the message I sent to Bandini.
“You think Carlos Bandini will leave Courtney Burke alone?”
“Maybe. He could be looking to even the score for his brother’s death. Before Tony Bandini died, if he told his brother what Courtney said to him about how much she knew of the family’s operation, Carlos might try to silence her. Since they know Nick was the one who overheard Smitty and Barnes admit Lonnie was the victim of a Bandini hit, I wanted to try to diffuse that. So that’s why I put you on speakerphone and called you Jimmy. Harder to kill three people than one.”
Nick wrapped a fresh ice cube in another paper towel and applied it to his lip. He said, “I’ve seen some pretty fast guys in my life, but none quicker than my man, Sean. He touched the emergency button on his key remote and the second that Barnes looked away, Sean hit him so hard he fell like he’d been struck by lightning. Before his pistol could fall to the ground, Sean grabbed it and drew down on gator guy. The whole thing was over in three seconds.”
Dave shook his head. “It’s not over. It’s just beginning. Ranging from a carnival mob family to what may be the next first family. Sean, how’d the news media find out that you and Andrea had a child together?”
“I don’t know.”
Nick said, “It’s a damn good bet she never said anything to anybody.”
Dave nodded. “Not after twenty years of keeping it a secret. Logan’s opponents are making a lot of political hay out of this thing. It’ll be a hot topic in tomorrow night’s debates, too. Have you heard from Andrea?”
“No, and I doubt that I will. Outside of her parents, someone else must have known … someone who she trusted. When the video of Andrea and me hit YouTube, a ghost had to have come out of the woodwork.”
Dave said, “Somebody looking for fifteen minutes of fame.”
“Or a pile of money,” Nick said. “Sean, can you think of a close friend of Andrea’s at the time, somebody she might have confided in?”
“Yes. Twenty years ago her name was Susan Lehman. Dave, turn on one of the cable networks.”
32
Dave lifted the remote off the coffee table and pointed it at his 42-inch flat screen behind the bar. CNN was in the midst of a newscast. The anchorman finished a story about Syria and said, “Turning to news here at home, the uproar continues in the Republic Presidential Primary debates as front-runner, Senator Lloyd Logan, faces questions about his wife’s past, with new revelations coming forth that she had a daughter out of wedlock. Logan, a staunch opponent of abortion, told reporters that he defends his wife’s decision to give the baby up for adoption almost twenty years ago. In the meantime, Andrea Logan has had nothing to say publically about the situation. However, a woman who says she knew Andrea when she became pregnant, Susan Cohen, said that the former Andrea Hart never told her boyfriend at the time, a man by the name of Sean O’Brien, that she was carrying his child. It was O’Brien seen on the YouTube video with Mrs. Logan, deeply sobbing in a Starbucks, while her husband raised five-million dollars in contributions outside the door.”
The video cut to an interview. The lower third of the screen flashed her name: Susan Cohen, the former Susan Lehman. Blonde, early forties, owl eyes that seldom blinked. She said, “I knew Sean, and I knew Andrea. They were the perfect couple, really. After Andrea broke off the relationship with him, she was almost three months pregnant at the time, she never told him about the baby. When I asked her why, she just said it would make things more complicated. But in my heart-of-hearts, I believe Sean would have raised the baby by himself if he’d known about the child. It really wasn’t fair to him or the child.”
The images on screen cut to the Ponce Marina parking lot.
“Oh shit,” said Nick as he watched us get out of the Jeep.
The narrative connected with the video. “Sean O’Brien is a former homicide detective with the Miami-Dade Police Department. It’s reported he spent time in the first Gulf War, and he was the sharpshooter who was involved in taking out the al Qaeda sect in Jacksonville last year. So, how all of this will play out in Senator Logan’s bid for the White House, nobody knows. When asked for a comment, O’Brien had little to say.”
The image cut to a close-up of me with a microphone in my face when I said, “My thoughts have do with walking my dog. Now, excuse me.”
The news anchorman added, “If Sean O’Brien is a good caregiver for his dog, can it be assumed he would have been a good father had he known that his former girlfriend, the current wife of Senator Lloyd Logan, was pregnant twenty years ago?”
I looked at Dave, “Shut it off.”
Nick ran his tongue across his front teeth and said, “Lookin’ at the pictures of Andrea Logan on television, and lookin’ at you now Sean, I can see a resemblance in Courtney Burke’s face.”
I said nothing.
Dave clicked the button and the screen went to black. He said, “I wish I could turn all this media frenzy down. You said it all started when you found Courtney Burke walking down that dark road. If she’s your daughter … the daughter of Andrea Logan, too, and Courtney is arrested on murder charges … and it’s found out, the media frenzy is going to hit unimaginable heights. And then Senator Logan’s bid to become the next president of the United States comes to a screeching halt.”
I stood from the deck chair and stepped to one of the salon windows facing the main public dock. I could see the dock master shaking his head, arms crossed, speaking with reporters. He was trying to keep them off private property. How long would that last? I turned back to Dave and Nick. “There’s only one way to know if Courtney Burke is my daughter, and whether Andrea Logan is her biological mother. I need DNA samples from both. And I need to have mine analyzed.”
Dave lo
oked at me over the glasses at the end on his nose. “There’s no way in hell that Logan’s people are going to let you within a city block of Andrea.”
“I don’t need to get to her; I already have it.”
“What?” Nick’s eyebrows arched, like two dark crescent moons. “I’m almost afraid to ask how you got it.”
“I was wearing a sports coat the day I met Andrea. There were no napkins at the table in the Starbucks. Inside the front pocket of my jacket was a clean, white handkerchief. When Andrea started crying, I handed her the handkerchief. She used it to wipe her eyes and nose. I remember seeing a smudge of her red lipstick on it, too.”
“Where is it?” Dave asked.
“In a Ziploc bag in the pocket of my jacket, and that’s hanging in the closet on Jupiter.”
Dave shook his head. “That little plastic bag and its contents could prove to be a Pandora’s Box for Senator Lloyd Logan and his two-hundred million dollar campaign to become the next president of the United States.”
Nick said, “But to get Courtney’s DNA, you got to find her. That’s not gonna be easy. In the meantime, Bandini may have put a price on her head.”
Dave said, “Carlos Bandini will be small potatoes compared to Senator Logan’s camp if this thing swirls out of the box or plastic bag. If the connection is ever close to being made that Courtney Burke is his wife’s biological child, a ‘love child’ who may have grown into a killing monster, what would they do to keep it from becoming public?”
I leaned down, picked up Max, and thought of something Courtney said on my boat, “This little dog is smart. I wish I’d had a dog when I was a little girl.”
33
Courtney Burke stood next to a window in the Airstream trailer and watched as the moon climbed above the dark waters of Bullfrog Creek. She listened to the chorus of frogs along the creek bank, their frenetic bellowing in the night taking Courtney back to her childhood. She remembered the time her gypsy parents parked their Volkswagen camper-bus on the bank of the Edisto River in South Carolina’s Low Country.
They were there for three days, living off the land, eating river mussels, rabbit, and fried squirrel. Her father spent a dollar to buy a half-dozen catfish and shrimp from a black man who sold them from a Styrofoam cooler on the side of the road, the yellow-bellied catfish and shrimp covered in shaved ice. Her mother fried them in a cast-iron skillet on a campfire her father built. After each meal, mama rinsed the grease out of the pan, usually in the river, and stored the pan in two crumpled brown paper bags she kept in the back of the camper bus.
Courtney blinked at the rising moon and buried her memories. She reached for a flashlight on a small table near the window, opened the screened-door, and stepped outside. The humid air smelled of moss and blooming orange blossoms. She thought of Boots’ warning about water moccasins and turned on the flashlight, its narrow beam shining over the dark water. There were more than a dozen sets of red eyes, some moving on the surface, others simply staring toward the light. Alligators. She could make out the head of one large gator, its red eyes spaced at least a foot apart. The gator swam slowly, blinking once, and coming to within twenty feet of the creek bank before sinking beneath the murky surface.
A dog barked. Courtney whirled around, looking up the long, sloping yard toward Boots Langley’s old 1950’s-style ranch house. Somewhere inside the screened back area, the large cockatoo, Clementine, sat on her perch barking like a dog. Courtney smiled, the slow, loud bark coming from the small throat of the bird and giving the frogs a run for their money.
Courtney swatted at a mosquito hovering around her face. She took a step toward the wrought iron bench seat under an old oak. She stopped walking, shining the light on the empty bench. Was a water moccasin lying on a low-hanging limb ready to slither down around her shoulders? She thought of the snake that Boots carried around on his shoulders, the snake’s cool skin touching the back of the little man’s thick neck.
The screened door slammed. Courtney looked up toward the house. Boots Langley stepped from the porch and shuffled down the yard, flashlight in one hand, a can of insect repellent in the other. He walked up to Courtney. “Saw your flashlight. Thought I’d bring you some mosquito spray. You stay out here long enough and you’ll be a quart low. If you don’t believe in vampires, watch a mosquito feeding on a human. They’ll gorge themselves on blood, increasing their body mass by fifty percent in one feeding. They’re such gluttons, sometimes they can’t even fly away.” He handed her the repellent.
“Thank you.” She sprayed it on her exposed arms, legs and neck. She closed her eyes and sprayed some quickly across her face. “I don’t know what’s worse, the bug bites or the junk in the spray.”
“Often the art of life is about rotating our poisons to prevent buildup.”
“I was gonna sit on the bench, but I didn’t want one of those moccasins falling from the tree.”
Boots grinned, a diamond stud in his left ear catching the moonlight across the wide creek. “Those cottonmouth moccasins would rather bite a fish or frog than you. At night, most of them are out hunting. Don’t worry about one being in the trees, just watch where you step.”
“Okay.”
“Let’s sit down.” They sat on the park bench, Boot’s feet a foot above the grass, the rising moon reflecting off the black water, the bearded profiles of Spanish moss like toothed shadows hanging from the tree limbs. “Now, Courtney, you want to tell me a little about what Isaac mentioned? He said you’re in search of something. Sounds like a person, and maybe that person took something of yours, correct?”
Courtney looked out across the flowing creek, her face drenched in the soft moonlight. She turned toward Boots and said, “You and Isaac are related. I can tell.”
“Did he tell you?”
“No.”
“How did you know? Is it because those hauntingly beautiful eyes of yours see what most others can’t?”
“It’s more of a feeling than anything. Who’s the oldest?”
“Me, by seven minutes. We’re fraternal twins. I like to think of myself as the older, and wiser brother.”
Courtney smiled and Boots said, “You have a lovely smile. It’s the first time in two days that I’ve seen you smile.”
“I haven’t had a lot to smile about lately.”
“I believe it’ll get better. I’m impressed that you knew Isaac and I are brothers. Except for our size, there are no similar features. Although he’s the Guesser, you dear, are not to be outdone. My brother tells me you’re looking for someone who took something. Who is it and what is it?”
“Boots, you’ve been kind to me. Allowing me to stay here. They’d arrest you, too, if they thought you were helping somebody like me.”
He smiled. “I’m not helping somebody like you. I’m helping you, and I’m not so sure there’s another quite like you. And that’s good because you’re unique.”
“Thank you. I’m looking for someone who owes my family something. He’s a little bit of a magician, hypnotist, and country preacher. He’s my uncle, and he’s pure evil.”
The sound of a dog barking fast came from the screen-enclosed porch behind Boots’ house. “That’s Clementine. And that bark is not the good bark.”
“You said it’s a warning. What does it mean?”
“It means someone or something is coming.”
“What do we do?”
“Shhh, keep your voice down. My gun is in the house.”
“I have one in my bag.”
“Now’s the time to get it.”
34
They kept the flashlights off. As Courtney opened the screen door on the Airstream, Boots said, “Don’t turn on the lights. Just hand me the pistol. I may have to hold it in two hands, but I know how to use it.”
“Okay.”
He waited by the door. The fast barking from the cockatoo suddenly stopped, the chants of frogs and cicadas mixing in the night air. Courtney handed him the Beretta and said, “Be careful.”<
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“Hide over there, behind the canoes. Here are the keys to the old red Toyota truck in my drive. If something happens, get away. Take the truck and go.”
“Boots, I can’t just—”
“Shhh. I’m going to check around the house and perimeter of the property.” He turned and vanished in the night, carrying a flashlight and the Beretta. Courtney stepped closer to the seawall that separated the property from the broad creek. She tried not to think about the water moccasins as she squatted between two canoes turned upside down and propped off the ground on cinderblocks. She could see Boots walking around the house, staying away from the direct light cast from floodlights on each side of the home.
Within a few minutes, Boots returned. He said, “Courtney, you can come out.”
She stood and walked back to the edge of the trailer, where Boots was waiting in the shadows. “What was it?”
He smiled. “It’s something that’s very scary to Clementine on her perch inside the screen. There’s a bobcat, probably weights forty pounds, and it caught some chickens in my neighbor’s yard last week. I saw fresh bobcat tracks in the wet dirt near my garage. Can’t get grass to grow there because it’s always in the shade. Clementine knew the bobcat was very near her. Poor thing. Come, let’s sit and talk. I’m intrigued by this hypnotist—magician—uncle of yours and what that thing is he owes your family. I’ve known a few magician and hypnotist types in my career. I want to hear more.”
They sat back down on the bench and Courtney said, “The thing taken is an Irish torc, a bracelet. It was my grandmother’s. My grandfather found it in a bog in Ireland many years ago. It was made during the time of the ancient Celtics. My grandmother wore it on special occasions, like their anniversary. She kept it aside in a safe place because of its value.”
“Is it worth a lot of money?”
“The value I’m talking about doesn’t come from money. It comes from the power of the bracelet, the power within the torc.”