Finders Keepers

by Shirl Henke

  “But that doesn’t give us the ammunition to get Steve back,” Tess said desperately.

  “You know yourself Mikhail won’t hurt Steve. And Matt will find Jenny and her girls. Once the cops have this stuff, they’ll arrest the old man and you’ll all be reunited. Odds are they’ll round up dear Nancy, too. I bet she’s up to her bleached eyebrows in this mess.”

  “Wrong. Dear Nancy had an accident. She won’t be talking to the police or anyone else. Neither will you,” a low silky voice said from the edge of the revolving door.

  “Alexi!” Tess cried. “You are alive, you bastard—you—”

  He slapped her with his right hand. “Yes, I’m alive and well, no thanks to you and your pals. He held a .9mm Beretta in his left hand and it was leveled at her.

  Sam remembered that he was a lefty. She could feel the weight of the .38 in her fanny pack, but getting to it wouldn’t be easy. How could she distract him? “So, you killed Nancy. Were you the lover boy your son saw with her on that yacht?” she asked, hoping to strike a nerve.

  He surprised her by laughing. “Not hardly! But she knew too much about our plans. I arranged a little drowning accident at her trysting place over in Bal. She’s always been a cokehead.”

  “So, an OD and she slips under the suds, huh?” Sam asked, edging closer. No way could she get to her gun without disarming him first. Just like the Charger door. She focused on the distance between them as she said, “It’s pretty hard to fool the M.E. faking suicides, especially considering who she was and the ongoing investigation.”

  “In a couple of hours, it won’t make any difference. I’ll be out of here…but you…well, my darling wife…” He caressed the cheek he’d slapped.

  “You really don’t give a damn what happens to your own son, do you, Alexi?” Tess asked.

  “The kid’ll be okay. Maybe after I get resettled, I’ll send for him, who knows?” he replied indifferently.

  Sam used the instant of distraction to edge closer. “You’ll have to arrange another accident for us, I guess. Is your partner in crime making the deal with Pribluda even as we speak?”

  His cold green eyes narrowed on her. “For some broad who got herself kicked off the police force, you know an awful lot.”

  “So does the task force that’s going to take down your family and the guys from Brighton Beach,” she replied.

  “They can have my dear father. Even Pribluda’s men—after they pay up. Then I’m home free.”

  “Going to cut out your partner after you collect from Pribluda’s goons?” Sam asked as she prepared to kick.

  His smile was frighteningly beautiful. Sam could understand why he’d been able to charm an intelligent woman like Tess Albertson. “I gathered all the information, risked my life in some of the worst hellholes of Eastern Europe and Russia to get it. God, how I hate that cold dirty place. Mother Russia,” he sneered.

  “Drug connections from Afghanistan?” Sam asked.

  “That’s only a small part of it. The really lucrative thing is the network. My father and I arrange to smuggle rich industrialists and their fortunes out of Russia and into the land of opportunity. You think Putin’s government won’t pay a fortune for that? After all, we’ve already sold Pribluda the locations of stockpiles of nuclear weapons scattered from the Black Sea to the Baltic. We’ll sell it again to the stupid spooks.”

  “So that’s why the CIA’s been protecting your daddy’s ass. He doles that information to them bit by bit.”

  “And who do you think has gathered that information for the past six years?” Alexi asked rhetorically, thoroughly engrossed in his tale now.

  Sam tried to telegraph to Tess that she was going to make a move.

  Tess seemed to understand. “Who’s helping you double-cross your father if it isn’t Nancy—or was it Nancy?” she asked.

  “Nancy had her uses,” he replied.

  “You cheated on me and your own father with her, didn’t you?” Tess accused angrily, balling up her fists.

  Sam raised her foot in a lightening kick, directed at his left hand, but he was a professional athlete, trained for instantaneous response. He dodged the kick by a hairbreadth and yanked Tess off balance before Sam could spin in for another strike. He held his wife in front of him, choking her and pressing the barrel of his gun to her head.

  “Now, back away,” he said through gritted teeth. “You know, you’re both really beginning to piss me off.” To emphasize his point, he struck Tess in the temple with the side of the Beretta. She stopped struggling. He let her fall to the floor and stepped away from her, all the while glaring at Sam. “I’ll bet you’re packing, aren’t you, bitch? Peel off that fanny pack and drop it.” The barrel of the gun never wavered.

  He obviously didn’t intend to shoot them outright or he’d have done it by now, so Sam went along, unfastening the pack and giving it an underhanded slow toss toward him. It landed beside Tess’s crumpled body. Wake up, Tess! Fast. He foiled whatever faint hope she had of Tess recovering the weapon when he kicked the pack across the room.

  “What kind of accident do you have in mind for us. A double drowning in his-and-hers baths would really stretch credibility.”

  “No need. A fire will take care of everything. Who knows, they may never find your bodies sealed inside this vault…or maybe they will, but the place will be gutted before anyone on the island knows. I turned the smoke detectors off and sealed all the doors and windows. Before anyone has an idea there’s a fire, my father’s airtight stronghold will blow sky-high.”

  With that, he stepped through the glass panel and closed it from outside. Sam could hear nothing after that. The lead-lined walls were soundproof. But she could imagine him as an arsonist all too easily, a logical progression for a stone killer. She knelt beside Tess and cradled her head on her lap. “Are you able to hear me?” she asked.

  Tess blinked, then nodded, still dazed. “He got away, didn’t he?” she asked, struggling to sit up.

  Sam started to retrieve her snub nose from the fanny pack but immediately realized that it was of no use in the metal room. “In the movies you can always shoot the lock off the door or something like that,” she muttered.

  “I smell smoke,” Tess said, crawling to the door panel.

  Sam cursed. “The son of a bitch did it!”

  “He set the house on fire?” Tess asked as she struggled to her feet.

  “If there’s a way in, there has to be a way out,” Sam said, talking to herself while she began examining the walls around the door. “What if you were in here filing something and heard somebody come in the bedroom?”

  “You’d have to be able to close the door from the inside if you didn’t have time to slip back out and close it from the counter,” Tess supplied hopefully.

  “So you’d have to be able to get out from here,” Sam replied, continuing to push and press. “You try the left, I’ll go to the right.”

  The two women set to work as the faint whiffs of smoke became stronger….

  Matt drove from the city across the Kennedy Causeway and headed north for Indian Creek Village. Traffic was snarled and every time he had to downshift the lousy old car stalled out. Not once while Sam had been driving had it done that to her. Sam. She and Tess were on their way back to the marina to meet him. He had no way to reach them since he had Tess’s cell and Sam had left hers in the car. It was well after three. They should be safe, wondering where he was, worrying about him.

  That brought a goofy smile to his face. Samantha worrying about him.

  They probably thought he was dead in some alley in South Beach behind one of Renkov’s strip joints. He grinned. He nearly had been. With Jenny and her kids safe and the cops on their way to rescue Steve, this just might turn out all right after all. He’d told the boy to call 911 and turn in dear old grandpa. The kid had done it and called him back to report success, then slipped the filched cell back into his friend Reena’s purse. Smart little dude.

  If Sam’s pal Pa
towski was as good as she said, he ought to have Mikhail and company cooling their heels in the lockup by the time he reached his destination. What a piece of luck that a traumatized kid could put the pieces of the puzzle together. Boy, not only had he been fooled, but so had Sam. Funny how his thoughts kept coming back to the maddening woman. In spite of her avaricious soul—maybe because of it—he was gone on her.

  Might as well admit it, Granger.

  The goofy grin returned as he imagined life with Samantha Ballanger. There’d never be a dull minute. But he was getting ahead of himself. First, he had some evens to take care of and a story to file. Pulitzer, here I come!

  He approached the drawbridge to the island, knowing he could not get in the way he had the last time. But he’d been giving the problem some thought and had a plan. He pulled onto a quiet residential street several blocks away from the entrance to the private island, then parked the junker. If someone here in the high-rent district complained about the eye-sore and had the cops towed it away, so be it. He’d be happy to pay Obregon just to get the menace off the road.

  He carefully deposited the Ruger he’d taken from the Russian mobster in the watertight pouch he’d picked up at a scuba place in Bal. He’d also purchased a snorkeling rig so he could swim underwater for a short distance. He strolled down the street like a tourist, watching the more modest homes around the area for a likely crossing place near the narrow channel separating Surfside from Indian Creek Village. When he found what looked to be a pair of houses with no one at home, he walked purposefully to the side door of one, then around the back.

  Still standing between the houses, he slipped off his bermudas and T-shirt and stuffed them along with his shoes in the watertight pouch after removing the snorkeling gear. Hoping the landscaping along the waterfront would keep the security cameras at the access bridge from seeing him, he slipped the snorkeling rig on, then moved into the water, submerged and began to swim.

  It took him about fifteen minutes to reach the other side and find cover. Matt tossed the snorkeling gear in some well-tended schiffelara bushes and pulled his clothes and shoes out of the pouch. He left the Ruger in the pouch and slung the pouch over his shoulder since he had no place to conceal the gun on his body, then began walking, feeling rather like “007” on a mission. He resisted the urge to dash flat out, knowing if he did it might draw attention, something he certainly couldn’t afford. Hell, he’d end up being the one interrogated while the bad guys escaped with a fortune.

  He moved along the curving road, pretty much hidden by tall hedges and stone walls. Only one car, a Lexus, passed him the entire time. The lush vegetation on the island looked like natural tropical growth, but it was likely cultivated carefully to maintain that illusion while providing privacy to each estate. When he reached his destination, he slipped behind a tall boxwood hedge, using it as cover to reach the boat dock he’d seen from a distance earlier.

  There it was. The fifty-foot Tiara. In a few hours it could take them to Bimini. He wondered when the deal with Pribluda would go down. Even the best-laid plans sometimes went wrong. Grinning sharkishly, Matt checked the house. No one was home. Maybe in town setting up their deal with Pribluda’s agents? He hoped not, but there was only one way to find out for sure. He slipped down to the dock and climbed aboard the boat, then ascended the steps to the steering station at the top level. He took the Ruger out of the pouch and stuffed it in his belt. Time to get to work.

  “It has to be here,” he muttered to himself as he used the screwdriver he’d brought to pry open the radio compartment. Then he reached inside, shining a penlight until he found a small cylinder. “Jackpot!”

  Matt pulled the tube out and sat back in the captain’s chair to look at the list that the CIA and FBI had fought over. It contained the exact locations of several dozen nuclear weapons caches scattered around Eastern Europe and in the small nationlets around the Black Sea, once part of the former Soviet Union. A second page was filled with Slavic names and bank account numbers, mostly in the Caymans, a few Swiss. The total was hundreds of millions.

  Completely engrossed as he put the puzzle pieces together, Matt didn’t hear the soft footsteps of a man climbing to the steering station behind him. He whistled low as he figured out what Mikhail and Alexi Renkov had been doing. “I wonder what their cut was?” he murmured.

  “Half,” Alexi replied conversationally. “Now drop the piece from your belt—very carefully.”

  Matt spun around in the chair and looked down the barrel of Renkov’s Beretta.

  Chapter 20

  Sam’s eyes burned like she’d soaked them in lye and sweat poured from her forehead, adding to her misery. The heat was intensified by their metal cage, which had become a literal oven that was suffocating them even faster than it cooked them. Blinking back tears from the smoke, she continued groping along the wall, now more by feel than sight. Tess fell to the floor, coughing in dry breaths as she fought for consciousness.

  “Don’t…give…up,” Sam rasped, “or we’ll be Pop-Tarts.” Her fingers continued pressing, moving—until suddenly she felt a smooth rounded bump behind the filing cabinet. She pushed it hard.

  The panel whirred open, letting in a black billow of smoke. Of course, putting the switch beside the door frame would have been too obvious. She should have thought of that five minutes ago—five minutes that could still cost them their lives. Sam reached down for Tess and started to drag her through the door, but Tess struggled to her feet and stumbled out on her own, coughing desperately.

  Flames leapt capriciously across the big room, setting the canopy on the bed ablaze. “Soak towels for us,” Sam told Tess, who seized two big bath sheets from an open shelf and held them beneath the high arched faucet on the whirlpool bath.

  While Tess was doing that, Sam checked the bedroom for a way out, wondering how Alexi had managed such a feat of arson so quickly. Probably a contingency plan if the police ever closed in on the family and they needed to escape and leave no evidence—some kind of accelerant handily stashed in strategic places. A jug labeled as a cleaning product, tossed empty in one corner of the bedroom, confirmed her suspicions.

  She scanned the room. The door to the hallway was a raging inferno. “The balcony,” she whispered to Tess, who followed her across the master suite to a large set of French doors. The heavy brass knob refused to turn. Sam tried again—and again with no more luck.

  “It’s the security…system. He…set it when he left,” Tess said, struggling to get the words out. “All the doors…windows…locked tight. We can’t get out…less I put in…code downstairs.”

  “That’s not an option,” Sam managed to cough out. She grabbed a heavy chair from the front of what must have been Tess’s dressing table. It weighed a ton, but as she’d already experienced on numerous occasions, when it was act or die, a person developed strength they didn’t ordinarily possess.

  Rather than trying to break through the small panels on the French doors, she took aim on the big picture window beside them, closer to the fiery bed than she would’ve preferred, but what were a few singed hairs compared to roasting alive? She swung like Barry Bonds still on steroids and connected with the glass, jarring every bone in her body.

  The window held. “Shit! Oh, shit!”

  “Now, I’ll take those,” Alexi said after Matt had tossed his gun to the floor and Renkov had kicked it across the deck. He indicated the papers Matt had been reading. He moved in closer, the Beretta steady, centered on Granger.

  “You don’t look bad for a dead man,” Matt said, holding the papers out so they fluttered in the breeze.

  “Let them go and I shoot.”

  “Shoot and I let them go. Looks to me like we have us a little standoff here.” Granger grinned.

  Alexi didn’t. He stepped closer again, just as Matt hoped he would. “I can’t believe you and your girlfriend were dumb enough to use paper and not to make copies.”

  “Oh, these are the copies, all right. Just a little
bonus to trade to my dear father’s friends at the Company once I’m safe in South America. She sold the computer disk to Pribluda’s agent in Miami this afternoon. I was ready to sail when your girlfriend and my darling wife interrupted.” Seeing Granger’s reaction to that, he smiled coldly. “I took care of them…and now, I’ll take care of—”

  Matt felt the breeze from the Intracoastal gust ever so slightly and let go of the papers. For an instant, Renkov’s eyes wavered. That was all Granger required. One long leg shot out and connected wickedly with Alexi’s right knee. Matt could hear cartilage pop as he came up from the chair and knocked the Beretta aside. A shot exploded, going wild as his fist landed squarely in Renkov’s gut. When Alexi tried to fire again from his doubled-over position, Granger twisted the gun away with his left hand and chopped Renkov in the side of his neck with his right.

  The golden boy of golf crumpled to the deck, out cold. Matt quickly stuffed the Beretta into his belt. The papers had not gone over the side but fluttered precariously near the stairs. Forgetting the Ruger, he lunged after the documents. But the fickle breeze whisked them in a lazy swirl down toward the deck below.

  Matt jumped down the ladder and knelt to scoop them up. His back was to the dock as he grabbed the last of his prize. “So thoughtful of you, Mr. Granger,” a cultivated voice said smoothly. “Now do be a dear and toss that Beretta of Alexi’s overboard, won’t you?”

  Granger cursed beneath his breath as he complied. Once that was done, his latest nemesis heaved a heavy satchel into the boat, then jumped aboard. For the second time in three minutes, he was looking down the business end of a Beretta.

  Sam swung the big chair, now minus one walnut leg, at the window again, concentrating on the crack that had appeared after her first effort. This time the glass flew outward. Tess covered her with a soaking towel an instant before the fire whooshed toward its fresh source of oxygen. Quickly using the chair to knock away jagged pieces of glass, Sam reached for Tess and they jumped through the fiery inferno onto the deck.