"Not right off the top of my head, but I'll keep my eyes open. What else? You said there were a couple of things."
"Yeah. See if you can pick up anything else on that Russo guy."
"The retired cop?"
"He's not just a retired cop. He ran MPD's homicide department."
"Okay, so he was a bigshot."
"Not just that. He was also MPD's liaison to the JTTF."
"JTTF?"
"Joint Terrorism Task Force. Every damn law enforcement organization you ever heard of, and some nobody even knows about, probably. Guys in jobs like that, they stay connected. You know what I'm saying?"
"Yeah. Like Davis?"
"Yeah, that's right. It's probably not an accident that they're both in this thing. We knew about Davis, but Russo's a surprise. Check him out, but watch yourself. You can't trust people like them."
"All right. I need to haul ass, Manny."
"Have a good time on that boat with those two gals, Ortiz. Sounds like some kind of wet dream." Cruz laughed, pleased with the low-brow pun. He opened the door and left, closing it behind him.
Ortiz shook his head and looked at his watch. He was going to have to miss his morning contact if he wanted to be on time for the sailing trip. Then he remembered that they would have heard his conversation with Cruz, so they would understand. Not only that, but they'd know everything he could tell them anyway.
****
"This is awesome!" Ortiz said, watching Dani as she bent to tweak the main sheet. Her muscles rippled under her smooth, bronzed skin, and the skimpy string bikini she wore was all but indecent, especially when she worked the sails.
"Beautiful, huh?" Liz asked from behind the helm.
He turned to look at her, embarrassed that she'd caught him staring at her friend. She gave him a knowing smile as she leaned over to engage the autopilot, the tiny top of her own bikini affording him a distracting view. She stood and shifted her stance, feet well apart, bracing herself against the boat's motion.
He swallowed hard when she looked him in the eye. She smiled again and leaned back, raising her elbows and pushing them out to the sides, stretching her arms as she moved her hands to the top of her head. She held his gaze, and gave him an impish grin as she shook her strawberry blond hair free. Putting the hair clamp in her teeth, she ran her fingers through her mane, letting the wind carry it out behind her as she shook her head.
She grasped a handful of hair close behind her head and pulled it tight, smoothing it around the sides of her head. Then she twisted the mass into one long skein and worked it into a fresh bun on the back of her head, never losing eye contact with him. She took the hair clamp from her teeth and put it back in her hair, grinning at him.
"So, you like it?" she asked.
"Um, uh ... " he stammered.
"She means the sailing, David," Dani said, slipping her arms around his chest from behind, pulling him back against her as she planted a series of light kisses across the tops of his shoulder blades.
"Like I said, it's awesome," he said.
"Good," Dani said. "Now that we're out of sight of land, let's leave Vengeance to Liz. Or vice-versa."
"Okay, but where are we going?"
"I put the cushions on the foredeck; you and I can have a little privacy up there while we get some sun."
She took his hand and scampered out of the cockpit, leading him along the leeward side deck. When they reached the bow, she dropped his hand and flopped face down on the cushions.
"Join me," she said, reaching into a small locker on the side of the coachroof and pulling out a tube of sunscreen.
As he settled to a sitting position beside her, she handed him the sunscreen and said, "Do my back?"
"I'd love to," he said, squeezing lotion into his hand.
As he began to spread it along her spine, he stopped to massage the knots of hard muscle around her shoulder blades. He chuckled as she moaned with pleasure.
"More," she said.
"Yes ma'am," he said, rolling to a kneeling position. He shifted his weight to put one knee outside each of her thighs, straddling her as he began to put his weight into the rubdown.
"You've got some serious muscles, lady," he said. "You work out often?"
"My whole life's a workout," she said.
"I guess so," David said, pausing to add more lotion as he moved down to the base of her spine.
"Mm," Dani said, arching her back, catlike. "You're good at this."
He chuckled, but didn't say anything. He began spreading lotion around the edges of her bikini bottoms, working a finger under the cloth every few strokes.
"David?" she said.
"Uh-huh?"
"Tell me what you're up to."
"I was thinking that these were in the way," he said hooking an index finger under the string that spanned the side of her hip. "Liz can't see us; the sails block her view."
"That's not what I meant," she purred. "I'm talking about why you're here to begin with."
"I'm here because I've become very fond of you, and you invited me."
She rolled over between his knees so that she was facing him and put her hands on his chest. "Mm," she said, smiling.
"Since we're asking questions," he said, "what's with Liz and her come-hither act?"
She smiled up at him. "You find her attractive?"
"Uh ... "
"I thought so," she said, the smile turning to a scowl.
"Wait! I -- "
"What, David?"
"Is this some kind of test? Or a trap?"
"A trap? What kind of trap do you think it might be?"
"To see how I reacted; maybe to see if I'd go astray?"
"And would you?" she asked.
"I told you, I've fallen hard for you, Dani. Liz is attractive, but it's you I want."
"Me? The béké's daughter?"
"What?" he frowned. "What's my mother -- "
"I fell for that first lie, David. And the second one."
"The second one?" he asked.
"Ha!" she said. "Gotcha."
"Wait, Dani. I explained -- "
"And speaking of lies, how does Manuel Cruz fit into this scheme of yours?" she interrupted.
He swallowed as he felt the color drain from his face. "Manny Cruz? What are you talking about? Scheme?"
"Manny?" she said, digging her fingertips into his pectoral muscles. "Is that what you call him?"
"I don't -- OW!" he shrieked, as she clamped down on the tendons in his chest, her steel-hard fingers digging into his muscles, pinching nerves.
"You need to tell me what's going on, David."
"Don't!" he yelped, as her grip tightened again. "That hurts!"
"You're going to find out about hurts, if you don't explain yourself."
He grasped her wrists in his hands, gripping hard. "Dani, I'm one of those old-fashioned guys who doesn't believe using my size and strength against a woman, but if you don't let -- "
She drove her knees into his buttocks, lifting him and throwing him over her head. Hooking her right hand into his left armpit, she guided his fall. Pulling down, she smashed his face into the leading edge of the coach roof as she slid from beneath him.
As he got his hands under his chest and began to lift himself to all fours, she was already on her feet. Dazed, he shook his head. Then she pivoted on her left foot and drove her right heel into his temple, knocking him senseless.
****
Chapter 18
"You heard about Lupita?" Cruz asked. He was keeping up with the traffic in the northbound lanes of I-95, in North Miami.
"What about her?" Maldonado asked, turning in the passenger seat so that he faced Cruz. He had asked Cruz to pick him up so that they could meet in the moving car, making it less likely that anyone would see them together.
"She's dead," Cruz said. "Santos called me. They think she had a heart attack, but they're doing an autopsy today."
Maldonado studied Cruz for a moment. Deciding that Cruz wa
s getting too comfortable with their relationship, he said. "No."
"Yeah," Cruz said. "I figured you hadn't heard; it wasn't on the morning news."
"You misunderstood me," Maldonado said, his eyes like a snake's when Cruz glanced at him. "I already knew she was dead. I meant that it wasn't a heart attack."
"How do you ... " Cruz's question trailed off as he grasped the hidden message. "It's probably for the best, anyway," he said. "Something they won't detect in the autopsy?"
"I wouldn't know," Maldonado said, staring straight ahead.
"We got a replacement for her," Cruz said.
"I heard," Maldonado said, watching Cruz flinch. "Keep him out of my affairs. If you want to take that kind of risk, that's your business."
"You know something about him?" Cruz asked, worry lines creasing his brow. He flicked his eyes toward Maldonado for an instant.
"I don't need to know about him. He's not involved in our project. You understand?"
"Y-yes." Cruz drove in silence for a full minute.
Maldonado watched him from the corner of his eye, amused by the way Cruz kept rolling his tongue around in his cheek. The nervous tic told Maldonado that he'd made his point with Cruz. "Tell me, Cruz, what has Ortiz learned from his time with the Berger girl?"
Cruz rattled off a concise report on Phillip Davis, Connie Barrera, and Paul Russo. He augmented what Ortiz had told him with information from his other sources.
"Interesting," Maldonado said. "The Barrera woman has some connections to the drug trade, you say?"
"That's only rumor, Willy. Some people think she's a snitch of some kind; others say she's got her own operation, and she's turning her competitors over to the cops. Nobody knows for sure."
"Is she of Cuban descent?"
"No. Ortiz asked her. Then he asked if she's Mexican, and she bit his head off. Told him she was American. But the rumors have her connected with some new Mexican cartel. That's if you don't think she's some kind of undercover cop."
"And Russo's tight with the antiterrorist task force," Maldonado said. "That makes them kind of an odd couple, unless she's a cop, too."
"Or unless Russo's bent," Cruz said. "That's another theory I heard."
"That he's working with the drug smugglers?" Maldonado asked.
"Yeah, that's option one. Option two is that he's straight and his wife's using him without his knowledge."
"Hmm. Any sign of why they're hanging out at Star Island?"
"Russo's an old pal of Espinosa's, and Barrera's tight with Dani Berger and Liz Chirac."
"I don't like it. There's too much coincidence. Can Ortiz find out more about what they're all doing together?"
"He's working on it; he's got the Berger girl eating out of his hand. They've gone out for the day on the yacht with the other girl."
"Chirac," Maldonado mused. "What do we know about her?"
"Not much. She's Belgian, worked for the EU in Brussels. She met Berger while she was on a sabbatical in the islands a few years ago, and they bought the yacht and went in business together. She's the chef and first mate; Berger's the captain. They've built up a nice business."
"Either one of them got a man in her life?" Maldonado asked.
"No. Not long-term, anyway. Neither one's been married, either. Berger was engaged once, though, years ago."
"Anything interesting about that? Her fiancé?"
"No. She was working in her mother's family's business, and so was the guy. She broke off the engagement and ran away to sea. She and her mother are estranged."
"Ran away to sea? That's odd. Why would an attractive young woman do that?"
"It's not so odd for her. Her father owns several big crewed sailing yachts that work the charter trade in the Med. She crewed on them in the summers from the time she was a kid. The sea's in her blood, from what we got."
"What's the mother's family business?"
"Investment banking. It checks out clean."
"Okay. Tell Ortiz to stay with it. Take the next exit; there's a coffee shop on the right as you get off. Drop me there. You have anything else?"
"Yeah. They're expecting another guy and his wife to show up before Espinosa's party. They're from Dominica. The guy's been in business with Berger and Davis for a long time. That probably means Espinosa, too, given that he's coming to the party."
"Who is he?"
"We don't know yet. All we have so far is Sharktooth and Maureen."
"What the hell? Sounds like a nightclub act of some kind. You don't have his real name?"
"Ortiz asked, but the Berger girl said the only name he uses is Sharktooth. We're working on it."
"I'll see if I can learn anything about him," Maldonado said, as Cruz pulled into the parking lot of the coffee shop.
****
The woman sat in her cubicle in the office building on Northwest 20th Street in Miami. She was dressed as a bag lady again. When David Ortiz had failed to make their morning rendezvous, she had opted to come in to the office and check the audio and video feeds from his apartment. She sipped coffee as she listened to his conversation with Manny Cruz.
Cruz talked freely; it was clear that he had no idea that someone had piggybacked on his surveillance. She made a note to have someone get a copy of the autopsy report on Lupita Vidal; both men sounded and looked surprised at her death, but the circumstances were suspicious.
She pondered who might benefit from having Vidal silenced. She agreed with Ortiz that it made no sense for the person who beat Vidal to have waited this long to kill her. That meant Vidal had at least two distinct enemies, each capable of violence. She wondered what Vidal had been doing.
It was possible but improbable that some of Vidal's victims could be behind the beating, except that the nature of the attack itself argued for a professional thug having done it. The Haitian refugees she mistreated might have sought revenge, but not in that manner. Her death, if not from natural causes, implied her involvement in some criminal enterprise besides Cruz's trafficking operation.
Ortiz had mentioned that Cruz was involved in planning an invasion of Cuba. She had passed that up her chain of command in spite of her own skepticism. There were always rumblings of that sort of thing from the exile community; nobody took them seriously these days. She couldn't fathom a reason why any of the exiles might have attacked Lupita Vidal.
She considered the idea that Vidal could have been involved with a rival trafficking operation, but that wasn't probable. There were no indications of such an activity. Cruz had a lock on exploiting Haitians, at least in the Miami area. There could be a rival operation elsewhere, she reminded herself. New York was always a possibility. She would check that out.
Meanwhile, she knew now why Ortiz had missed their regular contact; there was no reason for her to worry about him. He'd succeeded in planting François, which left them in a better position than they had been in.
With Ortiz covering Cruz and François working alongside Santos, they should be able to amass the evidence they needed to shut down Cruz and Santos. It was too bad that Ortiz was sidelined by Cruz assigning him to spy on the people at Star Island.
At least Ortiz was continuing to build credibility with Cruz. She reminded herself that Ortiz's relationship with Cruz had allowed him to engineer the replacement of Vidal with François. Sometimes a roundabout route was the fastest way home.
She did hope that Ortiz would manage to keep her informed, but she understood that he might be hampered by his effort to seduce Danielle Berger. She shook her head; that was an aspect of this work that she detested.
The idea that one of her agents was being paid to take advantage of an innocent young woman angered her beyond reason. But that's what it took to do this job, sometimes. She'd be less angry if she didn't know how much Ortiz enjoyed his role. She just had to suck it up and charge ahead. Innocent people got hurt in operations like this all the time. She could hope Ortiz might end up learning a bitter lesson one of these days, but she also hoped it wasn't
on her watch. She didn't need the grief.
****
Dressed in their normal attire of shorts and polo shirts again, Dani and Liz sat in the cockpit discussing their prisoner. Ortiz, still unconscious, was hog-tied, his wrists pulled up to his ankles behind his back. They had left him on the foredeck until they figured out what to do with him.
"You looked like you were enjoying that a little too much, Dani," Liz said, disengaging the autopilot and tweaking their course to take advantage of a wind shift.
"The massage was okay," Dani said. "But I could feel his eyes crawling over my backside. That was disgusting."
"It can be, sometimes," Liz said.
"You mean sometimes it's not?"
"If it's the right guy, it can be exhilarating."
Dani shuddered. "He's not the right guy, then, the creep."
Liz laughed. "Anyway, that's not what I meant."
"I'm not following you," Dani said.
"I meant the whole thing: orchestrating the set-up, the tease, the take-down, all of it. Especially when you smashed his face into the coachroof."
Dani grinned. "My timing was nearly perfect, wasn't it? I threw him and brought him down just as Vengeance was rising to meet him. It was almost like she wanted to get her licks in, too."
"That's what I meant. The broken nose was enough. That kick to the side of his head was over the top."
"I've told you before about stopping before you're sure your opponent's out for the count, Liz. Besides, he had it coming, the bastard, playing with me the way he has been."
"Maybe."
"What do you mean, maybe? He was using me, Liz. His link to Cruz says it all. The asshole was taking advantage of my vulnerability."
"Your vulnerability?" Liz laughed. "All that aside, I think he had some genuine fondness for you, Dani. I agree that he was using you, but one thing doesn't preclude the other. He followed you into your trap like a puppy. I think he really was falling for you. But don't worry; you took care of that."
"If he was falling for me, he sure helped himself to an eyeful of your little show, Salomé."
"I was right in his line of sight, Dani, just like you planned. You couldn't see his face. I promise you; he was embarrassed. He couldn't look me in the eye. I'd give him a passing grade on that test. I'm not sure why you put me up to that anyway, if you'd already decided to kick his ass."
Bluewater Revolution: The Twelfth Novel in the Bluewater Thriller Series - Mystery and Adventure in Florida, Cuba, and the Caribbean (Bluewater Thrillers Book 12) Page 15