Reckoning and Ruin

by Tina Whittle

  Trey got a call from Davis the second I pulled us into the Phoenix parking garage. His end of the conversation was monosyllabic, but I caught the drift—Hope was gone.

  I smacked the steering wheel. “I told you this would happen!”

  Trey waved me quiet and kept talking. “Yes, sir. I’d appreciate any further information. Thank you.”

  He returned his phone to his pocket, and I glimpsed the holster again. It didn’t conceal as well as the shoulder rig, but then, concealment wasn’t really the point of cop weapons. I wasn’t sure what the point was this morning; we were at Phoenix, which was as impenetrable as a moated castle. But a firearm was as much a part of the company dress code as a tie and Brioni lace-ups, even on a Sunday morning.

  “Well?” I said.

  “Hope declined the offer of a safe house, leaving the station on her own volition, but not alone. She was seen getting into a car with a unidentified woman.”

  “Unidentified? Didn’t they run the plates?”

  He kept his eyes out the window. “If they did, they didn’t share that information with me.”

  “Hope got a phone call last night. I bet it’s the same person who picked her up.”

  “An assumption on your part. We have no evidence.”

  I started to remind him that had I not been trying to manage his obsessive need to call in the authorities, I might have found out who was on the other end of that mysterious call. But I gritted my teeth and kept quiet. He’d started the morning in a reasonably manageable mood, and I didn’t want that to change.

  He looked annoyed nonetheless. “Hope also declined to fill out a missing persons report, although a police report has been filed on the incident and John’s information distributed with a BOLO to Savannah Metro.”

  “So it’s out of her hands now?”

  “Yes. And ours.”

  ***

  Inside Phoenix, the elevator doors opened onto a darkened hall. I’d only been up to the third floor, the field agent offices, a couple of times. It skeeved me a little, to be honest—the carpets that sucked up any sound, the blank gray walls, the office doors that were perpetually closed. I wondered what lay behind them, what electronic eyes were on me, recording and filtering and analyzing.

  “Are we the only ones here?” I said.

  “Most likely.”

  I saw Marisa’s office at the end of the hallway, the lights on, the door cracked. Trey knocked. When he got no response, he stepped inside. I gritted my teeth and followed him. My mouth was dry. I was gonna get reamed out, I knew it, and I was in no mood for it. I had my own lawsuit to worry about, after all, and Dexter’s shop didn’t have the deep pockets that Phoenix did, or its own legal team, or—

  Trey put a hand on my stomach. “Stop.”

  I stopped. Marisa’s office was deserted. A woman’s cardigan hung on the back of the desk chair, pale lilac, an Easter color. A briefcase lay on the desk, closed, along with a cell phone and a key ring. The room smelled strongly of coffee, but I didn’t see any. It was as if Marisa had been jerked into another dimension through some space-time portal.

  Trey cocked his head, listening. And then he reached under his jacket, switching his hand at the last second to the holster on his hip, moving smoothly from the cross-body draw to a side draw.

  “Trey? I don’t think—”

  “Shhh!”

  He held the weapon at low ready and moved into the center of the room. I saw what had caught his attention—a puddle on the carpet, soaked into the dark gray. And beside it, a single high-heeled pump. Lilac, like the cardigan.

  Outside in the hallway, I heard the squeak and slam of a door down the hall. Before I could react, Trey shoved me behind the desk. He pivoted, pulled the gun up with both hands, and took a sight line on the doorway. He gave no warning. He just waited, like a tripwire.

  Marisa appeared in the door frame. She was shoeless, her stockinged feet silent on the carpet, a coffee-blotched high heel in one hand, a wad of paper towels in the other. She assessed the situation for approximately a millisecond.

  “Trey Seaver,” she said flatly. “You drop that weapon and drop it now.”

  Trey slipped the gun back into its holster. “Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”

  And I let out the breath I was holding.

  ***

  It took us a minute to get back on track after that. Trey offered to clean up the spilled coffee, but Marisa told him to sit. He refused, preferring to stand in the corner with his back to the wall. I stayed out of the way, behind a chair next to the window.

  Marisa wore a shift dress the color of asphalt this morning. Even barefoot, she almost matched Trey’s six feet, and she was impressively built, with a bosom like the prow of a warship and hips like an earthworks fortification, with platinum hair forever pulled back in a tight bun. She had a clean pair of pumps on her feet now, back-ups she’d pulled from her desk drawer.

  She fumed at Trey as she daubed her shoe with a paper towel. “I should snatch your carry license.”

  Trey didn’t drop his eyes. He didn’t respond either.

  “Our insurance rep will be the final arbiter on that, however, at the briefing. Tomorrow morning at eleven, right before the McAndrews presentation, which you will also be attending, so don’t get any ideas about disappearing into your office.” She shoved a stack of file folders in his direction, tapping the top one with her finger. “There’s your copy of the civil suit summons and complaint. Tell me what you make of it.”

  He came out of his corner long enough to pick it up and flip it open to the first page. He read silently, quickly. Then he closed it and put it back on the stack.

  “Six million is somewhat excessive,” he said, “but still within precedent for a claim of reflex sympathetic dystrophy. He’s asking three million of Tai for a much less serious injury.”

  She switched her stripped-tundra gaze on me. “Ah yes. Tai. Again.”

  I heard the whisper of Old Charleston in her vowels, a sweet echo of her hometown, only a few miles up the Atlantic coast from my own. She’d practically obliterated the accent from her everyday speech; it only surfaced during periods of intense seethe.

  I made myself stand up straighter. “Yes?”

  She pointed the shoe at me. “Thanks to you, Phoenix suffered that debacle with the Beaumonts, which forced me to slash our operations and almost cost me my entire enterprise.”

  I shook my head. “That wasn’t my fault. That was—”

  “And then you talked me into providing security for some poetry event—pro bono, I might add—that also lurched into debacle in a few short days.”

  “Yes,” I protested, “but you got to meet the mayor, and—”

  “And then there was Savannah, and this mess with your criminally murderous cousin, whom we are dealing with yet again.”

  “Yes, but that one wasn’t my idea at all. And I didn’t—”

  “And then there was the most recent shotgun standoff. In a blizzard.”

  I folded my arms. “I cannot control Mother Nature. Besides, you weren’t involved in that, Trey was. And he—”

  “Exactly my point.” She pointed her shoe in his direction. “This man used to be my most reliable employee. I could count on him to deliver, in any circumstance, without complaint. But now that you’ve darkened every doorstep I have, he’s up to his neck in complications and conflict.” She fixed him with a look. “I can’t even count on him to stay fully dressed in the office.”

  I swallowed my surprise. I thought we’d managed to sneak that incident by her. Trey blushed and shot me a hot I-told-you-so look of epic magnitude, which I ignored. He’d had no complaints at the time, not a single one.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “That one really was all my fault.”

  Marisa’s voice rose. “I don’t care whose fault it was! That is not the poi
nt! The point is that every time my agency has crossed paths with you, it has been to my detriment. And now you’re dragging yet another problem in here, this one as fraught with disaster as the previous ones.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “I don’t care. Deal with it at your end. This is your official notice to keep me and my company out of it.” She waved a hand at us. “Now go, both of you. I’m late for brunch.”

  Neither Trey nor I budged. She raised an eyebrow. “Why are you both still standing here?”

  I stepped from behind my chair. “This isn’t just about a lawsuit anymore. There’s a missing person. And a car shot full of bullet holes.”

  Trey cleared his throat. “Alleged bullet holes.”

  I waved him quiet. “Fine. Alleged. But it’s not a coincidence that the same day we all get served with lawsuit papers is the same day that Hope Lyle shows up at my gun shop, full of lies and trouble and rumors. This is a much bigger problem than Jasper’s spiteful lawsuits, no matter how many millions are at stake.”

  Marisa looked at Trey. He nodded. She closed her eyes and rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Explain.”

  So I did.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I started with Hope showing up at my shop, described the whole backstory she’d dumped in my lap—missing husband, creepy white stalker truck—then concluded with the Blue Line holding her, the Cobb County PD dragging her off to the station, and her leaving late the previous night with an unidentified woman.

  “Anyway, if Hope is right, Jasper is working a scheme bigger than money, and whoever disappeared John—”

  “Allegedly disappeared John,” Marisa said.

  I took a calming breath. “Hope thinks whoever allegedly did it was really after her, to keep her from testifying. But now she’s disappeared too. And we need to find her.”

  Marisa swiveled in her chair, back and forth. “Has she disappeared? Or has she simply decided to seek protection from somebody other than you?”

  “That could be the case. And that person could be Jasper.”

  Marisa stopped swiveling. She’d connected the same dots I had—that finding Hope was less about protecting her than it was about protecting her testimony. That the only thing Hope had to trade at this point was that testimony, and that if indeed Jasper or his lawyer or his blasted investigator had gotten their hooks into her, we’d lose her in the upcoming criminal trial. And we needed her to verify that Trey’s actions had indeed been self-defense. There was, as people kept reminding me, a four-year statute of limitations on aggravated assault. If Trey ended up taking a felony charge for those three bullets, Jasper’s multi-million dollar lawsuit would look a lot less frivolous.

  She looked at Trey. “You have the 302s?”

  He unsnapped his briefcase and pulled out several manila folders, which he handed to Marisa. I recognized my own handiwork peeking from between the covers.

  “This is preliminary,” he said. “I haven’t had a chance to go through LINX yet.”

  “But you’ll do that first thing in the morning.”

  “Of course. I’ll have a report for you before the meeting.” His eyes flickered my way. “Tai did the majority of this work.”

  Marisa read without comment, starting with the file on Ainsworth Lovett. I could see the New York Times piece on him, complete with one of the few photographs I’d found. A mousy specimen, nondescript, turning his face from the photographer. For someone who loved notorious cases, the man himself was camera shy.

  “This explains the civil suit’s astronomical damages,” she said. “Lovett does not come cheap.”

  “He does not.”

  She tapped her finger against the folder. “Could Jasper be getting some money from other sources? How about his brother, what was his name again?”

  “Jefferson.”

  “Yes. Jefferson is still on the KKK Selectmen Council, isn’t he?”

  “He is. But this is the new improved family-friendly Klan, the kind that adopts highways, and part of their rebranding is behaving lawfully. Jefferson has completely disavowed Jasper, as has the Klan.”

  “What about their father?”

  “He’s disavowed the whole thing. Except for Jefferson. And me.” I waved a hand at the materials on her desk. “I don’t know how all this connects yet. I haven’t talked to Boone or Jefferson since the incident. And Garrity hasn’t heard anything from the prosecutor or the detective on the case. But I’m making progress. And when I find something out, I’ll let you know.”

  “Good. Do that.” She swiveled some more in her chair, suspicious, assessing. “So what is it you’re asking me to do?”

  “Find Hope. Or John. Or both.”

  She scoffed. “Phoenix does not offer bounty hunter services.”

  “Then I’ll find them, and when I do, you can offer them executive protection—which Phoenix does offer—until the trial.”

  Marisa fixed me with a withering stare. “Seriously?”

  “Look, I’m not asking for them, or myself.” I pointed at Trey. “I’m asking for him. Because despite certain recurring hiccups and regardless of that one—one!—insignificant indiscretion on top of his desk, he’s been loyal to you and Phoenix. And you know that if Hope recants, if the trial starts to go sideways, he could get hit with an assault charge, maybe some grievous bodily injury tacked on. And Phoenix legal could probably drag the company out of it, save itself and abandon him to the industrial prison complex. But you’re a better woman than that.”

  Marisa stared. Trey too, with much more discombobulation. I didn’t care. He needed all the help that Phoenix could offer, even if he was being an ass, even if I had to convince his own boss, a woman who despised me, to protect the woman I despised most in the world.

  I saw Marisa adding up the cost of such a thing, balancing it against the six million Jasper had set his sights on. She’d clawed her way to the top in a field unfriendly to females, and she’d kept the books in the black and the lights burning with a cutthroat pragmatism. But I knew another part of her code was at play. Marisa never left a man behind; she was as unyielding as a Marine about that.

  “Find either of them and we’ll talk,” she said. She turned to Trey. “As for you, you’ll be staying as far away from this as possible until the situation cools off, hopefully because John Wilde stumbles back into town.”

  Trey’s eyes were wary. “But—”

  “No buts. Go round up your firearms proficiency reports, the most recent ones, and bring them to me.”

  He hesitated, but then nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Marisa listened to his footsteps down the hall, then the ding of the elevator. She shook her head. “He’s calling me ‘ma’am’ again. I thought I’d broken him of that.”

  I shrugged. “Things with Trey are a little…retro right now.”

  “No kidding. I see he’s got his old sidearm again, which does not fill me with optimism.” She drummed her fingers on the desk. “What’s going on with him?”

  “I honestly don’t know.”

  “Is it good or bad?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  She watched the doorway. “This is a piece of nastiness on a Sunday morning. Rumors and revenging, all that Southern Gothic shit.” She fixed me with a look. “When do you leave for Savannah?”

  I blinked in surprise, but I should have been expecting the question. “Tomorrow morning.”

  “Without Trey, of course.”

  I nodded.

  “Have you told him yet?”

  “No. It’s just now becoming clear that this is what I need to do. And that I need to do it without him.”

  “Good. We agree then.” Marisa closed her briefcase. “I suppose you’re wanting me to keep him busy at this end?”

  “I think it would be in everyone’s best interest. He does better wh
en he has a routine.”

  “That’s one way to put it.”

  She was examining me with all the subtlety of an X-ray. Sometimes I forgot that Marisa was dangerous. I’d only seen her in CEO mode, the smooth hustle of someone who knew how to grease the proper wheels. But she also knew how to break bones with the flick of a wrist and carried a Glock in her fancy handbag.

  She stood and reached for her cardigan. “I can deliver at my end. I hope you can deliver at yours.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Trey didn’t speak on the way home. It was a short ride from Phoenix to his complex, and I let him have his silence, hoping it would settle him. It didn’t. He was still agitated when we got back in his apartment, even with the door triple-locked behind him. I knew this because he went straight to his computer, holster still on his hips, tie still around his neck.

  I sat on the edge of his desk. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “About what?”

  “What happened at Phoenix.”

  “Nothing happened at Phoenix.”

  “You drew down on your boss. You call that nothing?”

  He pulled up a spreadsheet. I recognized it—a statistical summary of the white supremacist organizations currently operating in Georgia, with separate lines for their money trails, including the one that linked the Savannah KKK to the larger relic community.

  “My preliminary evaluation of the scene was incorrect,” he said. “I adjusted my response accordingly when I had more information. There’s nothing to discuss.”

  His expression was indifferent, words clipped. I knew there was no breaching the wall. My only hope was that a couple of hours mainlining charts like they were tranquilizers would calm him down. Maybe then we could talk. There was only one small problem.

  I squared my shoulders. “You’re not going to like this, but I’m going to Savannah tomorrow. And I’m going alone.”

  He didn’t look up from the screen. “I know.”

  “This is not a situation that will respond to top-down management. Savannah is crooked, and weird, and I need to be able to maneuver there, which means…” I froze. “Wait a second, what did you say?”