Cane and Abe
Page 32
Angelina’s messing with you, Abe. She’s been messin’ with you.
I backed the car out of the garage and stopped at the end of the driveway. Brown sugar and what? It came to me, and I drove to the grocery store, past palm trees covered with twinkling lights and other signs of the holidays in south Florida.
Agent Santos had moved on. Literally. I never found out what she had done to piss off the powers that be at FBI headquarters, but she’d done her penance in the Miami field office, and her reassignment was short-lived. She was back in Quantico with the Behavioral Analysis Unit, where she belonged. I’d thought about sending her a congratulatory note but never got around to it. Or maybe I feared that her reply would be something along the lines of I’m not finished with you, Beckham. Or your wife.
“Excuse me, where are your Skittles?” I asked the stock boy.
“Aisle seven.”
I wasted five minutes in the candy section before realizing that I’d misspoken. I found the shallots and brown sugar, spent another fifteen minutes in the so-called express checkout lane, and headed home.
Angelina and I didn’t talk about Tyla’s death anymore. Or J.T.’s. It had taken months for her to open up to me. I was still undecided about what to do with her confession.
There had been no second phone call from Tyla to J.T. The lone voice-mail message had been their only communication, which by itself wasn’t nearly enough to set J.T. off and convince him that Tyla was coming back for me. The photographs of Tyla and me in the restaurant had pushed J.T. over the edge. He’d gotten them from Angelina.
I dialed Angelina from my car. “Got what you needed,” I said.
“Thanks, honey. Hurry home.”
Angelina’s mother was a smart woman. Smart enough to have seen how unhappy her daughter was in her marriage. The proverbial “other woman” had been Margaret’s immediate suspicion. The private investigator that Margaret had hired to follow me on my trip to Orlando had earned his money with those photographs of Tyla and me. Why Angelina had shown them to J.T. was a mystery to me. We’d talked about it for the last time over the Labor Day weekend. She’d told me that she was merely gathering all the information she could about Tyla, and that she wanted to see if J.T. knew the truth about Tyla and me. Her explanation was plausible. But there was another possibility, one that played on J.T.’s paranoia, fears, and vulnerability: Had Angelina gone to J.T. and presented Tyla Tomkins as a common enemy that needed to be eliminated?
No, she’d told me. Absolutely not, Abe.
But I had my suspicions. Back then, I was still using Samantha’s birthday as my iPhone password, and it would only have made Angelina angrier when she guessed it. Who else would have answered my ringing cell phone when I was in the shower and had a two-minute conversation with Tyla? Who else would have continued to check my voice mail and deleted four separate messages from Tyla? Who else could have overheard me talking to Rid or Santos about Cutter’s signature, and why else would she have smeared ash on the photographs and sent them to herself, making it look as though Cutter had killed Tyla and was coming after her?
Why else would she run?
Angelina didn’t run because she thought she was going to be Cutter’s next victim. She didn’t run to teach me a lesson or because she was afraid of me. Angelina ran because she knew J.T. had killed Tyla Tomkins. She feared that he was going to name her as his accomplice—the person who had put the idea in his head and perhaps encouraged him to do it. Maybe she’d gone even further, convinced Tyla to meet someplace private to talk woman to “other woman,” sent J.T. in her place, and then helped J.T. rent the car that he—or they—had used to dump the body in the Everglades. She’d panicked in the middle of the night, hocked Samantha’s ring at a pawnshop, bummed a ride from two young women to the Miccosukee Resort in the Everglades, and tossed her cell phone on the Tamiami Trail as they passed the spot where Tyla’s body had been recovered—Hey girls, I’m feeling carsick back here, I’m going to roll down the window. She’d tried to disappear, only to return two days later after realizing how much work it really is to make yourself vanish.
I couldn’t prove that. I didn’t even want to think it. But sometimes I wondered. Sometimes I still thought she was messing with me.
I laid the shallots and brown sugar on the kitchen counter. “Here you go.”
“Thanks, honey.”
She was smiling. Angelina was happy these days, and getting really big. The pill, our ob/gyn explained, was 99.5 percent effective, not 100 percent. I sometimes wondered if Angelina had really been taking it, and if our “reunion” had been planned around her most fertile time of the month. But I put bad thoughts aside. We had a baby girl on the way. Life was good, right?
“Dinner will be ready at six.”
“Great,” I said. “What are we having?”
“Your favorite. Osso buco.”
Yes, Angelina was still messing with me.
It made me wonder which dinner would be our last.
Acknowledgments
Twenty-five years ago I started writing a novel about Florida’s sugarcane cutters, a mystery set in the Everglades. At the time I was a young lawyer in a large Miami law firm, and after four years of coming home from my day job and writing late into the night, the result was not so sweet. My agent, Artie Pine, told me I’d gotten “the most encouraging rejection letters” he’d ever seen. Seriously. Those were his exact words. “Put the sugar story aside,” he told me, “and write another novel.” So I did. Twenty-two more, to be exact.
Cane and Abe bears no resemblance to that first stumble, but my return to sugar and the Everglades after more than two decades had me thinking often of “Artie the optimist,” whom we all miss. His son, Richard, continues to be my agent, and I’m forever grateful for his guidance. My editor, Carolyn Marino, has been part of the dynamic trio almost from the very beginning. Her experience and expertise continue to make me a better writer.
My beta readers, Janis Koch and Gloria Villa, have become indispensable members of this team effort. Thank you for the keen eye and attention to detail that is becoming a lost art in this “auto-correct” world. Assistant editor Emily Krump is the newest member of the team. Welcome aboard!
I also want to express my special thanks to Rex Hamilton and the Everglades Foundation. Our daytrips into the Everglades and Florida Bay were unforgettable experiences, highly educational, and invaluable sources of inspiration for Cane and Abe. My son Ryan especially dug the airboats.
Incidentally, I was single and dating a beautiful woman who held a degree in English literature when my first sugar novel crashed and burned. She married me anyway. Thanks, Tiffany, for sharing the highs and lows and making it all so much sweeter.
JMG, fall 2014
About the Author
JAMES GRIPPANDO is a New York Times bestselling author whose novels are enjoyed worldwide in twenty-six languages. Cane and Abe is his twenty-first novel published by HarperCollins, and it comes on the twentieth anniversary of his debut thriller, The Pardon (fall 1994). He is also the author of Leapholes for young adults. James was a trial lawyer for twelve years before he became a writer, and he is now counsel at the law firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP. He lives and writes in south Florida.
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Also by James Grippando
Black Horizon*
Blood Money*
Need You Now
Afraid of the Dark*
Money to Burn
Intent to Kill
Born to Run*
Last Call*
Lying with Strangers
When Darkness Falls*
Got the Look*
Hear No Evil*
Last to Die*
Beyond Suspicion*
A King’s Ransom
Under Cover of Darkness*
Found Money
The Abduction
The Informant+
The Par
don*
For Young Adults
Leapholes
*A Jack Swyteck novel
+Also featuring FBI Agent Victoria Santos
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
CANE AND ABE. Copyright © 2014 by James Grippando. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.
ISBN: 978-0-06-229539-2
EPub Edition January 2015 ISBN 9780062295422
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