Cold As Death (The Mira Morales Series Book 5)

by T. J. MacGregor

  COLD AS DEATH

  Book Five of the Mira Morales Series

  By T.J. MacGregor

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright 2013 / T.J. MacGregor

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  T. J. MacGregor is the author of more than 30 novels and in 2003 won the Edgar Allan Poe award for Out of Sight. She was born at Ballantine Books in 1987, when her editor told her that her maiden name, Trish Janeshutz, was too difficult to pronounce and that mysteries by men were outselling mysteries by women. Could she please come up with a name that had initials? By then, she was married to novelist Rob MacGregor, so she became T.J. MacGregor. A few years later, she wrote Tango Key and by then, mysteries by women were outselling mysteries by men and her editor asked her to create a new female name for that book. So, she became Alison Drake.

  She lives in South Florida with her husband, novelist Rob MacGregor, their daughter, Megan, three cats and a noble Golden Retriever.

  Book List

  Black Moon

  Black Water

  Category Five

  Cold As Death

  Dark Fields

  Esperanza

  Fevered

  Ghost Key

  Hidden Lake

  High Strangeness

  In Shadow

  Lagoon

  Out of Sight

  Tango Key

  The Hanged Man

  www.trishjmacgregor.com

  www.aliensinthebackyard.com

  www.synchrosecrets.com/synchrosecrets

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  For Tony Janeshutz,

  the best dad anyone could ask for.

  10/20/1913-9/25/2005

  Special thanks to:

  My husband Rob & my daughter Megan,

  & to Kate Duffy & Al Zuckerman.

  You make all things possible!

  COLD AS DEATH

  Between the idea

  And the reality

  Between the motion

  And the act

  Falls the Shadow

  Between the conception

  And the creation

  Between the emotion

  And the response

  Falls the shadow

  —T S. Eliot, from “The Hollow Men”

  PART ONE

  Vision

  We live in “nonlocal” reality, which is to say that we can be affected by events that are distant from our ordinary awareness.

  —Russell Targ, from Limitless Mind

  Chapter 1

  Hilt House

  The hillside looked as if a giant in the midst of a temper tantrum had torn across it, knocking down trees, ripping bushes out by the roots, trampling everything in its path. Here and there, Mira Morales passed pines or banyans that still stood, but most of them had been stripped of needles and leaves and their trunks had been sheared of bark. On one area of the hill, a dense copse of pines had survived the hurricane relatively intact, trees huddled together like orphans, the top branches leaning left, blown that way by the wind.

  On the street below her, piles of debris waited at curbsides to be hauled away—vegetation, broken fences, sheets of aluminum, chunks of concrete. Some of the piles stood five or six feet high and included mattresses, doors, sofas, chairs, rolls of moldy carpet, broken refrigerators, stoves, tables. Even now, five weeks after Hurricane Danielle had roared in, her winds in excess of 155 miles an hour, Tango Key still looked like Hiroshima, but without the bodies.

  Mira paused to catch her breath. The air was so still that birds didn’t sing, branches didn’t stir. The speckling of clouds in the vast blue field of sky resembled tiny white sailboats stuck in the doldrums. The air smelled scorched, as if an iron had been held too long to a wardrobe of shirts. The extreme heat and humidity caused her T-shirt to cling to her. Her denim shorts, soaked through with perspiration, felt like they weighed fifty pounds.

  She pulled her thick black hair behind her head and snapped an elastic band around it, getting it off her neck. She was tempted to pour her bottle of cold water over her head, but decided she was much too thirsty to waste it. She twisted the cap and drank down half of it.

  Question: Why had she ventured out on a morning in late July when the temperature already stood at a muggy ninety and it wasn’t even seven yet?

  Well, that was easy. She couldn’t stand the reality of what she faced, another day of struggling to piece her bookstore back together. The boxes of books she had salvaged were now housed in the yoga room at the back of the store. Each day, she opened boxes and checked each title against a master inventory list. She figured she had saved only a third of her entire inventory, but remained absurdly hopeful that the statistics would improve.

  Hurricane Danielle had crashed ashore at high tide. The water had exploded upward through the wooden slats of the Tango pier, collapsed the concrete pilings, and swept through the downtown with the power of some ancient, enraged god. At its peak, the water at the front of her store had reached six feet and when it receded, it left behind a soggy beach of mud, sticks, stones, and shells. As the mud dried, creatures crawled out of that dark, erratic landscape: fire ants, snakes, skinks, spiders, roaches, worms, mice, rats, a regular zoo.

  For some reason, the yoga room at the back of the store, separated by a wall and a metal door, had remained relatively dry. The books she had stored in there and those she had taken to her house were all that remained of her inventory.

  The exterior of the store had sustained major damage-holes in the roof, dry rot setting in to the wooden front door and the floor, trees still down, the fence collapsed. The storage shed, crushed like a tin can, still had an uprooted banyan lying across it. The work crew that was replacing most of the store’s roof would be hammering and pounding today, another crew would be laying tile on the eastern side of the store, and someone was coming out to remove the banyan and the remains of the shed.

  Yet, her store and home could be repaired and rebuilt. Other people had not been as fortunate. With nearly a third of the buildings on Tango completely destroyed, hundreds of people were homeless and dozens of businesses had been wiped off the map. On her bookstore’s block, only two buildings out often remained: her bookstore and Mango Mama’s, a restaurant that had withstood hurricanes since the early 1940s. The Tango bridge, the island’s connection to the rest of the world, had lost six miles of concrete and steel and wouldn’t open again for another year. The only ways to or from the island were by air or ferry.

  Since eighty percent of the island was still without power, they lived under a curfew and what amounted to martial law. For looting, they were told. To keep people safe, the officials said. No alcohol was being sold on the island as long as the curfew was in effect, so a black market now flourished. On a given day, a bottle of ordinary California red wine—five bucks at your local grocery store—could be had for thirty to fifty dollars a bottle. A six-pack of beer was going for
about fifteen bucks. A bottle of hard liquor—any hard liquor, regardless of its quality—began at about seventy-five dollars.

  Generators were also in great demand. For a basic unit that would power a refrigerator, a few lights, and maybe a TV, the standing price was $1,200 cash. Without gas, though, generators were useless and only one gas station on Tango presently had power. Most mornings, its supply was sold out before breakfast.

  You could leave the island to buy any of these items, but only if you had enough gas to make it somewhere. Forty percent of the power in Key West had been restored, yet it was as sporadic and unpredictable as true love. Most of Sugarloaf Key, fifteen miles north of Key West, supposedly had gone back online four days ago. But according to the grapevine, dependable power, continuous, uninterrupted power there was a pipe dream. Between Sugarloaf and Key Largo lay an electrical wasteland where life languished in the Dark Ages.

  To find anything being sold in the black market on Tango, you had to drive two or three hours to Miami. Only the courageous, the stupid, or the owners of VWs, hybrids, or other models that got great gas mileage even attempted the trip. In a state where SUVs, Hummers, Suburbans, and other gas-guzzlers proliferated like mosquitoes in a swamp, she figured that maybe five to ten people on Tango were making it as far as Key Largo or Miami for liquor, food, generators, and gas. Even though there were laws against price-gouging in the aftermath of a hurricane, no one in Key Largo, the nearest place with steady supplies of gas, had been arrested for charging five bucks or more a gallon.

  Here on Tango, people whose homes had been torn apart had banded together to keep watch over each others’ properties because looting was still a problem. And, like tribes of old, they also shared supplies, food, and water. In this regard, Mira considered herself fortunate as well. While the extensive reconstruction of her home was under way, she was living in a trailer on her property that belonged to two of her long-time clients and friends. Until the hurricane, Ace and Luke had been evening street performers on Tango’s pier. With the pier gone, they now did odd jobs on the island and had become her extended family while her daughter, grandmother, and three cats were staying with friends in Miami, where there was power.

  Unplugged from the grid, life in the Florida Keys and especially on Tango Key had screeched to a halt. All the rules had changed. It was a whole new universe.

  In the weeks since Danielle had turned Mira’s life into a parody of survival and a search for the most basic items—ice, bottled water, canned food, gas, propane—she had forgotten who she was. The who had become irrelevant. What she could do and when she could do it were all that mattered. And so, during those times when she couldn’t face the stink or the mess in her store any longer, she went walking.

  Every day, at various times of the day, she ventured to a different part of the island and invariably discovered areas on Tango she had never seen before. Neighborhoods tucked away in the hills, coves on the west side of the island where dolphins frolicked, old buildings that had withstood time and hurricanes. On these walks, she understood what had driven men like Magellan.

  And on these walks, she thought a lot about global warming, the gradually rising temperature of the planet’s oceans, the shrinkage of the ice shelf, the wetlands that the current administration had opened to developers, the loss of barrier islands that once had provided buffers from monster storms. There would be more storms, bigger storms, monstrous storms that would make even Danielle look insignificant. And then the coming global oil crisis would bring about the collapse of an era of unbridled greed, lies, and corruption.

  She walked faster, as if to outdistance this line of thought. Right now, she had to focus on her little corner of the world.

  Her thighs and calves had gotten tan, lean, hard as rock. She had dropped eight pounds. Freckles now dotted her cheeks and crossed the bridge of her nose. Physically, she felt stronger and healthier than she had in years. She supposed her psyche was healing too, but she had some serious doubts about her heart.

  Five years with Wayne Sheppard had ended in the bleak hours when Danielle had moved on, ended out there in a wind-ravaged grove of trees. The door had slammed shut with resounding finality shortly afterward, when he had moved out of her place and in with his partner, John Gutierrez. Annie, her teenaged daughter, was furious with her. She loved Sheppard like a father and as far as she was concerned, the whole thing was Mira’s fault.

  If you weren’t so weird, Mom, if you weren’t always so certain you’re right… In other words, Mira thought, bend like a straw and you can keep your man. Never mind if you have to compromise yourself or what you know to be true. Five years might be just spit in the huge cosmic soup of things. But it was five years of loving the same man, of being accustomed to the solidness of his body next to you in bed at night, five years of habits and quirks and memories that were tough to obliterate. She and Sheppard had hit dry patches before in their relationship, but never had come upon something that felt as final as this did.

  Mira started climbing again, moving more quickly now to escape the pity party her thoughts had become. She realized the hill was steeper than she’d thought, strewn with fallen trees, uprooted vegetation, the old trail obscured. She kept climbing; the air grew warmer. She spotted a lizard dozing on top of a rock in the hot sun. As she passed it, the little thing opened its eyes and watched her. Lizard, lizard. What message did the lizard have for her?

  Camouflage. Slow down the pace of your life. Be still, watch, observe.

  Yes, okay. That fit.

  Nadine, her grandmother and business partner, understood completely what had happened between her and Sheppard. She never came right out and said Mira was better off, but Mira suspected Nadine was thinking it. Nadine and Sheppard rarely agreed on anything. There will be other men, Nadine assured her.

  Oh? That was supposed to console her? She considered herself lucky to have loved twice—Sheppard and her husband, Tom Morales, dead now for ore than a decade. She had invested so much of herself in these two relationships that she doubted she had the fortitude to go through yet another.

  Forty-one and your sex life is over.

  Mira finally reached the top of the hill and sat down to drink in the view. The Gulf of Mexico spread out far below her, an unbroken vastness a deeper shade of blue than the sky. The heat released the sweet scent of grass, the thick humidity of the July air.

  Distantly, like a voice in a dream, she heard someone screaming for help, a woman. Her voice—wild, frantic, desperate—hammered the stillness. Mira shot to her feet, listening hard, and heard it again. She ran toward the voice, arms hugging her sides, hands fisted. Her vision turned strange, blurry one moment, clear the next; then she was racing through a world as black and white as a photographic negative. She tore around a pile of dried bushes and gnarled branches, crashed across a collapsed wooden fence, and finally saw it, there on top of the hill, a burning house.

  Flames leaped from the windows, tongues of fire licked at the roof, fat plumes of dark smoke curled toward the dome of gray sky, swollen with thunderheads. And she saw it all like a negative. A woman stumbled down the driveway, waving her arms frantically, her clothes on fire. Before Mira reached her, an old Buick raced away from the side of the house, tires kicking up dust and gravel.

  The car was between Mira and the woman. Even in this strange black and white world, it shimmered and quivered like a mirage. Mira shouted and waved her arms wildly, trying to flag down the driver. She jumped a low hedge and ran fast across a lawn, trampling recently planted flowers, and reached the driveway just yards in front of the car.

  She saw a boy’s face pressed to the glass, his eyes wide, dark, horrified. He clawed at the window, his mouth opened wide in a scream she couldn’t hear. The car didn’t slow. It bore down on her at an alarming speed—and then passed through her, ghostlike.

  Mira felt the car’s passage through her blood and bones. It shocked her so deeply that she looked down at herself like some actress in a bad movie, al
most expecting to see a huge hole in her abdomen. She was intact, but her knees buckled and she went down.

  It seemed she lay there for half a lifetime, her face in the dirt, the gravel biting into her forehead, her cheeks, her heart hammering, the center of her chest seized up. Heart attack. I’m in cardiac arrest and just hallucinated all that.

  Something wet and warm slid up the side of her cheek. She raised her head and there sat a fluffy Himalayan cat, its soft blue eyes regarding her with frank curiosity. Mira rolled onto her back, sat up, and the cat scampered off.

  Color had returned to her world, but she didn’t see a car. Or a woman on fire. No burning house or terrified kid. Her ticker was still ticking. Only one explanation fit: She was locked inside a full-blown mental meltdown.

  Jesus God, she was a mess. Mira got shakily to her feet, feeling disassociated, not quite here, as though she’d left part of herself back in the vision of the fire, the fleeing car. She turned slowly in place. Tasted dust in her mouth. Felt it caked on her hands, her face. The light was bright, the sky wasn’t overcast. The house looked peaceful and serene and different.

  What’s going on? Had she seen something from the past? The future? A probable future? What? Just what the hell had she seen? And why had she seen it in black and white? As far as she could remember, that hadn’t happened before.

  Who lived in this house?

  Where’s the woman? The car? The kid? The cat?

  Mira moved hesitantly up the driveway and toward the house, slapping her shorts free of dust. Her face hurt. She’d lost her bottle of water. A sudden terror gripped her. Maybe recent events in her life had caused her grasp on reality to unravel. Stress. Sure. Stress could cause it. Category-five hurricane. House no longer habitable, living in a trailer, store closed, no income, lover of five years gone, her family elsewhere. Rootless.