Deep Down Dead

by Steph Broadribb

  If Emerson hadn’t known there was a bounty hunter due to pick up JT from the ranch, he’d learnt about me pretty fast. By snatching my daughter and demanding the device as ransom, his men had gambled on the fact JT would help me. Last night, in Thelma’s Bar, they’d threatened me in order to get him to come quiet. In ninety-nine percent of cases those tactics would never work: a fugitive wouldn’t ever help out a bounty hunter. So how did they know it would work with JT?

  Shit. Maybe they’d discovered our history.

  I used my fear to force myself alert and assess the situation. First off, I had to be sure JT hadn’t returned.

  Padding across the room, I slid the chain back and opened the door. The air outside felt damp and thick, like you needed to grab it between your fingers and squeeze out the moisture. I reckoned the temperature was near on eighty and climbing.

  I checked the walkway left and right. No one.

  Promise my ass.

  That’s when I saw it. The carved figure, no more than two inches high, was sitting right in front of the doorway. I bent down and picked it up. Held it between thumb and forefinger. Studied it. It wasn’t Sal, and it wasn’t Dakota. It looked like me. I shook my head. That crazy old bastard really had been talking shit. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to laugh or cry.

  I didn’t do either. Shoving the wooden figure into the back pocket of my jeans, I stepped over to the railing and stared out over the parking lot, past the huge rigs gleaming in the early-morning sun to the trees beyond. They stood dark and dense, blocking the light so the ground beneath them lived only in shadow.

  What had happened to JT? If he’d gotten out of Thelma’s, stayed in Savannah a while longer, hiding out or following the gunmen, then him not being back was still cause for hope. But what if the SUV guy had caught him, or the cops had taken him prisoner? I flinched, remembered the two gunshots, didn’t want to consider the possibility of something worse.

  Delayed, captive, or dead – I’d no way of knowing. Whichever it was, the end result was the same. Doing nothing was not an option. Getting Dakota back was up to me.

  I needed the device to trade for my daughter. Scott had it, or at least knew where it was. Problem was, I had no clue where to find him. Last night JT had reasoned that Emerson’s men had gotten to him. We didn’t know for sure.

  I strode back into the room, and, grabbing my cell, opened my call history and looked for the call JT had made to Scott the previous night.

  I pressed the number. Waited as the call connected. In the silence, all I could hear was my pulse thumping.

  Two rings, then the voicemail picked up. A nasal-sounding guy spoke on the recorded message, ‘You’ve reached Scott. Leave a message, I’ll call you right back.’

  As the beep sounded, I hung up. Voicemail again, and JT had said Scott never turned his cell off. Damn. I guessed JT had been right. Somehow I doubted Scott would be calling back anytime soon. He was a dead end, for now at least, so that meant the device was too.

  The knot in my stomach tightened. Without the device I’d nothing to trade. Worse, if they did have JT, and Scott knew his protector was captive, how long would it be before he gave up the location of the device? JT wouldn’t cave, that was for sure. But Scott – JT had doubted that he’d last long. Once they’d gotten the device Dakota would become unnecessary.

  I shuddered. Tried not to think about all the things JT had told me about Emerson and his sick sideline. I couldn’t let that happen to my daughter.

  I needed another plan. I had to find the men who had Dakota.

  JT had told me Emerson travelled between amusement parks. Chances were that he’d not seen Dakota yet. I had to hope that, while she was still of value as an asset for blackmailing me, she would be safe from him. I just had to believe that. The alternative was too horrendous.

  I strode to the basin at the far end of the room, ran the cold tap and splashed water on my face. My stomach rumbled. Moving back towards the desk, I grabbed the pack of cookies that’d been laid out beside the kettle and coffee sachets, and scoffed them down. Felt a little better. More alert. Good.

  Now focus, I told myself. Treat it like a job. If Dakota was still with Emerson’s goons, the men who’d snatched her at the gas station, then I had a chance. Track them, jump them, and take care of business. Think. What’s the best way to track a moving target?

  Find the constant. There’s always one: a person, a location, an item. Find it, and you’ll find the target. What was the constant here? The pieces of the puzzle circled in my brain: a bounty hunter and a security guard working together; a police report that didn’t match JT’s version of events; the men at the ranch getting killed; Emerson’s men chasing us; Dakota kidnapped; the search for Scott.

  I walked back to my carryall by the desk. Pulled my ruined dress off over my head and chucked it in the trash. Thought harder. The timeline of the last few days, it fitted together real neat, but it didn’t help me none. Me, JT, Dakota, Scott, Emerson’s men; the constant that linked us was the device. But the Miami Mob connection, JT had denied that had gotten anything to do with Scott and Emerson. So the device couldn’t be the constant I needed. There had to be something else. I had to look further, past the obvious.

  So, as I rummaged in my carryall for my spare pair of jeans, I made an effort to put aside my immediate concerns and thought about the file Quinn had sent me: the details of JT’s previous conviction; the homicide charge; the rednecks who’d jumped me at the Yellow Spring ranch and the absence of Merv; the television news report linking the Miami Mob to the ranch shooting.

  But the puzzle pieces just didn’t fit.

  I felt the nausea rising. Dropped the jeans on the floor, gripped the edge of the desk. The wood was cool beneath my fingers. I shut my eyes, concentrated on my breathing. Inhaled. Counted to seven. Exhaled. Counted to eleven.

  That’s when I remembered.

  My mentor had always given me a tough time about my being so damn impatient. ‘Trouble with you kiddo,’ he’d say, ‘is you assume that partial view you’ve got is all you need to know. You gotta be mindful of the bigger picture. You go making decisions based on one piece of evidence, acting like that one thing is the whole truth, and you’re heading for trouble.’

  Well, shit. Trouble couldn’t have gotten much deeper than it was at this moment, now could it? I thought about rule number four: Don’t make assumptions.

  Maybe I wasn’t looking at it right. What if I had all the puzzle pieces but I’d gotten them turned around the wrong way. What if the constant wasn’t linked to the device? What if it was linked to JT?

  I bent down, picked up my jeans and pulled them on. As I reached into the carryall for a tee, I thought that maybe Merv being the one to pick JT up hadn’t been a part of JT’s plan. Perhaps he’d reckoned on it being Bucky, hadn’t known that Bucky had gotten himself all shot up on another job. And Bailey wouldn’t have cared a damn about any bad history between Merv and JT. His eye would have been on the prize, not the practicalities.

  Way I saw it, Merv was most likely still pissed about whatever happened between him and JT in that bar a few years back. He’d pressed charges against JT. Turned on one of his own, another bounty hunter. That was messed up. You had a problem, you got it straightened out between yourselves. Physical or verbal, whatever it took. But calling the heat? Never.

  So the thing between them, I reckoned it had to be a big deal. Which meant that, whatever axe Merv had been grinding for JT back then, he was most likely still carrying. And with JT in his custody he’d have had the perfect opportunity to give it a swing.

  Instinct told me Merv was balls-deep in this thing.

  I thought back to the start of the job, two nights before at the Yellow Rock Ranch. Merv should’ve been there to meet me, but he wasn’t. The three rednecks worked for the Miami Mob and, from what JT said, they’d been soldiers waiting for a higher-ranked gang member. We’d gotten out. Emerson’s men must have pitched up a few hours later.

  B
oth groups had been after JT.

  Question was, how did they know where to look? Aside from me, and JT himself, only three other people had known his whereabouts: Quinn, Bailey and Merv.

  I doubted that Quinn would have given me the job if he’d been planning to stage an ambush, and Bailey, bigoted son-of-a-bitch that he was, had no form at being a rat. So that left Merv. A man always after the fast buck, who’d hire himself out to the highest bidder, no questions asked.

  Maybe this time, instead of his skills, he’d offered up JT’s location. Sold him out. From the near-death whipping he’d gotten, I guessed he’d sold out twice – tried to take money from the Miami guys and from Emerson’s men.

  Well that move had been just as dumb as a stump.

  From what I’d learnt so far about Emerson’s guys it seemed they were out to neutralise any threat to their operation, purging all evidence and eliminating witnesses: the device, the rednecks, and, soon, most likely me. Merv had been real lucky to get out alive.

  It was time I paid him a visit. If I was right, Merv would know how to contact Emerson’s men, maybe even have a location. But to find out where Merv was, I’d have to go through Pops.

  Like JT, Merv’s biggest contracts were oftentimes with Victor ‘Pops’ Accorsi. Pops always had tabs on what his go-to boys were up to. Nothing happened without him knowing, a fact he’d always been real proud about. So I reckoned he’d be able to tell me exactly which hospital Merv was in. I just needed to persuade him. And I planned on being mighty persuasive.

  I pulled on my boots and grabbed the keys to the Mustang from the nightstand. Getting information from Pops meant heading back downtown. This was a conversation I’d have to have face-to-face, eyeball-to-eyeball. Pops never would talk business over the phone.

  It was time to spin my wheels.

  31

  Having ditched the Mustang in the lot behind the Marriott, I strode along Montgomery, past the palm trees lining the street outside the Savannah Springs Hotel, and along to Chatham County’s concrete lump of a building. A couple of cops were leaning on the hood of their ride. I smiled real sweet as I carried on past, hung a right across the street and scooted around the back of a brown sedan parked up at the curb.

  I’d caught the local radio news on my way across town, heard them talking about the shooting at Thelma’s Bar the previous night. They said the cops had gotten two suspects in custody, but didn’t give names. Gave me hope though. What with JT being a fugitive suspected of multiple homicide, I reckoned they’d have announced his capture real proud. So I figured that Emerson’s man – SUV guy most likely – had taken him prisoner, or that JT was free and clear and, hopefully, on his way back to the motel.

  But, as I hurried along the sidewalk, the other scenario nagged at me – that JT had gone, used us getting split up to take advantage and disappear into the wind. I hoped to hell I wasn’t right.

  Pops’ place hadn’t changed. Same big old red-brick, same blue-and-white striped awning, same cut-price, pink-neon-signed wedding chapel next door. Pops’ sign was black on white, and real businesslike: Bondsman – Open.

  I pushed open the door and entered. The office looked just like I remembered: a large desk and chair, two chairs for clients and a row of metal file cabinets.

  ‘Hey, Deloris,’ I said to the skinny woman behind the desk. ‘Pops in?’

  She leapt up, bangles jangling, and scurried round the desk towards me. ‘Lori, my sweet child,’ she said, wrapping her sparrow arms around me and giving a good squeeze. ‘Where you been that you couldn’t pick up a phone?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’ve got to see Pops, it’s real important.’

  Deloris sighed. ‘First visit you pay us in years, and you still racing. It’s like you got the devil himself chasing you, child.’

  She was righter than she could possibly know. ‘I’m sorry, Del.’

  As she hugged me again I heard a chair scraping against the wooden floor in the back room, and Pops’ deep growl said, ‘What’s with all the noise?’

  ‘Lori’s here,’ Deloris called.

  Pops shuffled through to the office. He was a little rounder and a whole lot balder than when I last saw him, but still looking good for his sixty-seven years. ‘Thought you were dead,’ he grunted.

  I smiled. ‘Missed you too.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t you call? Near gave Deloris an ulcer, all that worry when you skipped town.’

  I shrugged, trying to make out me leaving had been no big deal. ‘Felt my time here was done. Sometimes a clean break is best, y’know?’

  Pops sighed. ‘Heard you had a kid?’

  I nodded. One thing I learnt real early on when working with Pops was never to tell him more than he knows.

  ‘Real shame you left that way. Had a good thing going. I know he missed you.’

  I gave Pops a warning look. It’d been years since I’d stepped foot in this place, and in under a minute he was riding me. ‘Don’t, okay?’

  He didn’t look too happy. ‘Fine, if that’s the way you want this to be.’

  Deloris, as always, ignored the tension and handed me a mug of coffee. ‘Strong and sweet,’ she said.

  Just as I used to like it.

  ‘So you looking for work?’ Pops asked. His smile was wide, but there was something a little forced about it. The warmth didn’t quite reach his eyes. I wondered what was going on behind them.

  He’d given me my first break: a skip trace on a college-kid drunk driver. ‘Nah, I’m good. I’m looking for Merv.’

  Pops raised an eyebrow. ‘Is that right?’

  ‘He knows something about the case I’m working.’

  ‘Yep, heard about that.’

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. Pops is connected, if you know what I mean. Back in the day he had a piece of every racket going. Course, now he’d become almost as big a part of law enforcement as the cops, and was definitely more respected. Still had his connections though. Possibly more.

  ‘I figured Merv might be able to help me out on something,’ I said and took a sip of coffee.

  He stared at me a moment. Ran his hand over his bald spot, smoothing an imaginary strand of hair back into place. Frowned. ‘Bit of free advice: don’t go asking him questions.’

  Pops didn’t give free advice. He never gave anything for nothing. This was a warning. But I held his eye. ‘So where’s he at? A local hospital?’

  Pops shook his head, looked away, starting flicking through a stack of unopened mail at the side of Deloris’ desk. ‘Now why would you go and pick up JT? After everything that happened, shouldn’t you have let him be?’

  Damn. This was harder than I’d reckoned on. ‘It was a job.’

  ‘How could it ever be just a job, Lori? And to take him to Florida, surely you know what that means?’

  Enough stalling. I needed an answer. ‘Come on, Pops. Where’s Merv?’

  ‘Some things it’s best to keep your pretty little snout away from.’

  ‘Quit the drama. I’m asking because it’s important. Tell me.’

  Deloris scurried out of the back room, pressed a fresh mug of coffee into Pops’ hand. She turned to look at me. Smiled a tight smile, her tombstone teeth gritted together like shields. ‘If you’re in trouble, sweetie, why not ask the Lord for help.’

  I drummed my midnight-blue nails against my coffee mug, noticed the polish had started to chip. ‘Me and the Lord don’t see eye-to-eye much these days.’

  Pops sighed. I guessed he knew I’d keep pushing until I’d gotten what I needed. ‘Merv’s been transferred to Good Hope. He ain’t doing so well.’

  I smiled. ‘Appreciate it.’

  Pops peered out of the window, towards the street. ‘JT. You got him with you?’

  I shook my head. ‘Not here.’

  He looked back at me. ‘He’s different, Lori. Ever since that whole thing went down, JT ain’t been the same. Not even to Pops. Whatever you kids messed in…’ He shook his head. ‘You know the mob put a price
on him, dead or alive, don’t you?’

  Shit. Now that I did not know. ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t play dumb with me, Lori. Old Man Bonchese was very unhappy. Tommy Ford – one of his best men – getting dropped? Well, that took a lot of smoothing out.’

  He had to be shitting me. ‘The Miami Mob thinks JT—’

  ‘You didn’t know?’ Pops shook his head. ‘Guess that figures. JT always was trying to protect you. After what went down they wanted blood. I managed to persuade them to be lenient.’

  ‘How?’

  Pops shrugged. ‘I couldn’t have them taking out my superstar bounty hunter, now could I? Me and the Old Man have good history. Some favours he owed me got called in.’

  I stared at Pops. Tried to keep my expression neutral. Pretty sure I failed. How could JT not have told me? The Miami Mob put a hit on him because of Tommy. Which meant because of me. And he didn’t think to damn well mention it? ‘So what did you—’

  ‘Real lucky JT was, that Pops was able to parlay for him.’ Pops nodded as he spoke, looked real smug. ‘They put a restriction on him, out of courtesy to me. So long as he stayed out of Florida he’d be fine. But if he stepped back across that state line even once, he’d be gone.’

  I frowned. ‘Even now?’

  ‘Ten years ain’t so long. Not in that business.’ Pops sucked the air in through the gap in his front teeth. ‘Real shame, but I can’t do nothing. He’s on his own.’

  No he wasn’t. He was with me. Still, now I knew why Pops couldn’t believe I’d take JT back to Florida. More importantly, I knew why the mob was after him. When he’d crossed the state line into Florida, to find Emerson at Winter Wonderland, the hit must’ve become live again. He’d have known that would happen, and he’d still taken the risk. That told me whoever had been hurt at Winter Wonderland was real important to him, even more important than his own safety. Made me wonder again who they were, if there was someone waiting for him to come home. Whether he really had changed that much.