A Quarter for a Kiss

by Mindy Starns Clark

  The third dog reluctantly abandoned what he’d been chewing on and ran to the man, who scolded him. The man’s attention was on that dog, fortunately, which left our friend the shepherd free to keep his newfound toy.

  “Let’s go,” the man said in a deep island accent. “On up the hill.”

  They started walking back up the winding gravel road, and the foliage was so dense it was hard to keep them in sight. But we could still hear them, the breathing echoing in our speakers like an obscene phone call.

  “Come on,” Tom whispered. “Don’t drop it yet.”

  Once I lost sight of them completely, I put down the binoculars and went back to the telescope, trying to see if it might allow me any glimpse of the house. But there were so many plants and bushes and trees that it was no use. The most I could make out from this angle was one corner of the roof. And our boat was drifting and turning so badly in the water that it was hard to stay focused in that direction anyway. I suggested to Tom that we relocate a bit farther away, completely out of sight of the house. He complied, deftly raising the anchor, moving the boat beyond the next cove, and then tying it up to a mooring line.

  Though we couldn’t see anymore, the sounds continued. The man spoke to the dogs occasionally, but it was mostly mindless chatter, hard to understand over the sound of the dog’s breathing. Finally, we heard the opening of some kind of gate and then, a moment later, a few beeps that were probably the entryway to the biometric security system.

  “Okay, time for breakfast,” the man said, and his comment was followed by what sounded like the eager scrambling of dog feet on a tile floor. “You want chicken and rice or beef stew? I think it is a beef stew day.”

  There was a loud “clunk” and I had a feeling the dog had dropped the bone on the floor. He must have started gnawing on it then, because the sounds we were getting now had changed from heavy breathing to a garbled chewing.

  Beyond the noise the dog was creating, we could hear different muffled sounds, and I told Tom that was the problem with electronic surveillance. You expected everything to sound like it did on a radio show—clear and distinguishable. The truth was that most sounds weren’t that distinct. It took an experienced ear to know what you were listening to sometimes. Eli had trained me well, but I was by no means an expert.

  Nevertheless, I thought I caught the whir of a can opener running and then the scrabble of dry food being poured into a bowl. Suddenly, the chewing stopped, and it sounded as though the dog’s attention had turned to his breakfast.

  “This is nerve-racking,” Tom whispered. I nodded.

  We had to listen to the dogs eat, which seemed to go on forever. The man must have stayed there with them, because occasionally we could hear him whistling. While we waited for something more interesting to happen, I pulled out Eli’s file again and studied the satellite photos of the house and grounds.

  In the pictures I could clearly make out the gravel road they had taken up from the beach. That road ended at the paved driveway, and there was a flagstone walk that led in a curve around the side of the house. I was willing to bet that the kitchen was right inside that back door, because it hadn’t sounded as though the man or the dogs had gone any farther into the home than a room or two.

  Suddenly, we could hear a woman’s voice, calling in the distance.

  “William!” she said, and Tom and I looked at each other, eyes wide. “William,” she said again, her voice sounding closer.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “I’m getting an alert from the sweeper. Has anyone been here?”

  “No, ma’am. I just brought the dogs down for their run and then we come back. The system was on while I was gone.”

  “Call Earl for me, would you? Tell him I need a manual.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  There was silence except for the chewing dogs, and Tom and I looked at each other.

  “Busted,” I said softly.

  “Earl, this is William,” we heard suddenly, and from the crackle, it sounded as if he was using a walkie-talkie. “Miss Dianne want a manual sweep of the house. She’s getting an alert on the TSCM.”

  “Right. On my way,” a deeper man’s voice replied.

  “What do we do now?” Tom asked.

  “We keep listening,” I said.

  William spoke again.

  “All right, you get along outside now. Breakfast done.”

  The dogs’ nails clicked excitedly on the tile, and I had a brief hope that our shepherd might grab the bone and carry it right outside with him. Unfortunately, he seemed to have forgotten it. We could hear the door open and the sound of the dogs running outside. The door closed. All was silent.

  “We’re in trouble,” Tom said, leaning back in his chair.

  Suddenly, however, we heard a muffled sound, and then a loud scraping sort of noise that sounded as though the man was picking up the bone. He made some kind of grunt, and then we could hear the door opening again, a whoosh, a big thud, and some barking.

  Tom and I looked at each other, eyes wide.

  “Keep the toys outside, you dumb dogs!” the man called from a distance. Then the door shut and all was silent.

  Tom and I looked at each other and burst out laughing—not that the situation was funny, just that we were so relieved.

  “Maybe they won’t find out after all,” he said. “I doubt they sweep outside in the yard.”

  “Yeah, but in the meantime, we’ve lost our ear inside the home. At least now we know what we need to know. They do have sweepers. We’ll have to use the smaller, less powerful bugs with the transmitter box.”

  “Before we even do that,” Tom said, “I think we need to switch to a different boat. This one’s so tall, the flybridge is acting like a sail. We need something smaller and lower to the water so we don’t drift around so much.”

  “Let’s go do that now,” I said. “Then it’s time to send in the big guns.”

  Twenty-Six

  The “big guns” were actually quite tiny: Twelve little low-frequency disks that would serve as undetectable bugs. The hard part was getting them inside the house—and, once that was done, placing the corresponding transmitter box near enough to pick up their signal and then send it out to the boat.

  For now, we could still hear through the dog bone, though mostly we were getting silence with the occasional bird twitter or dog bark. It seemed the bone had been tossed into the garden and forgotten.

  Things were getting so stuffy inside our little cabin that we turned up the volume and moved to the back deck. We sat in the fishing chairs, enjoying the cool breeze. For almost an hour, we tossed around ideas for how to get the little bugs into Dianne’s house—from having Tom knock on the door posing as a salesman to sending her some bugged flowers. Almost every idea we threw out could have worked with the average person. But for someone as careful—and protected—as Dianne, we knew anything out of the ordinary would be seen as suspect.

  In the end we went back through the Windward Investigations report that Eli had had done, reviewing every element of this woman’s security system, looking for weaknesses.

  “It’s no wonder Eli couldn’t get anywhere with all of this,” I said. “That place is a fortress!”

  “Where there’s a will, there’s a way, my grandma used to say.”

  “Yeah,” I replied, getting up to go down to the galley to fix us an early lunch. “Your grandma wasn’t a security expert by any chance, was she?”

  “Nah,” he replied. “Though considering how well she guarded her recipe for crawfish étouffée, she should have been!”

  Lunch for us was a simple ham sandwich with a side of chips and a soda. I smiled at Jodi’s choices from the grocery store, realizing she was probably still young enough to be able to eat whatever she wanted and not worry about her figure. I would have to get to the store myself soon and stock up on some more healthful fare.

  My mind went from making a mental grocery list to thinking about Eli’s notes regarding
grocery delivery. I called to Tom, and he came down and joined me.

  “What if we went in through the groceries?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dianne receives a weekly grocery delivery. If we can get hold of it, we can plant bugs in some of her groceries.”

  “You mean like inside the packaging, where they wouldn’t show?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Won’t we just end up bugging the kitchen?”

  “Not necessarily. There’s always soap or toilet paper or boxes of tissue, things like that. There’s a wild chance that a few of the items could get moved farther into the house. We have at least twelve of the little bugs to work with, so our odds are pretty good.”

  “How do you zero in on the bug you want when they’re all over the house?”

  I thought about that and finally shook my head.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not exactly an expert in this stuff.”

  “Well, I agree that the groceries are her biggest weakness,” Tom said, nodding. “But we can’t add anything to her list. We’ve got to work with what’s there. Otherwise, she’ll get suspicious and we’ll get caught.”

  “All right,” I said, pulling out my phone. “Let me call the grocery store and find out when they deliver.”

  I looked up the number for Island Foods and then called to ask if they offered grocery delivery, pretending to be a potential customer. Their answer matched what we’d read in Eli’s notes, that they delivered between 1:00 and 5:00 P.M., Wednesdays and Saturdays, with a $50 surcharge to deliver to the East End.

  Once I hung up, we sprang into action, bringing up the noisy anchor and starting the boat’s engine. As we sped through the open water, we talked out our plan. It contained a lot of variables, but we thought it was worth a try.

  Tom’s first inclination was to do this legally and aboveboard, showing the warrant to the owner of the grocery store and enlisting his cooperation in the planting of the bugs into the groceries. I had to remind him that we were flying blind here, with no real idea of who could and could not be trusted.

  “For all we know, the grocery delivery man is their contact,” I said. “We can’t trust anybody.”

  In the end we agreed that a little espionage was in order. Sometimes you have to fight fire, I reminded him, with fire.

  Back at the harbor, we didn’t take time to switch out the boat but simply loaded our gear in the car and headed straight to the grocery store. Once there, Tom parked us at the far end, backing into the space so that we could see the entire place from our vantage point.

  “The next question,” I said, “is whether they pull the groceries they’re going to deliver from the shelves or from the stockroom.”

  “Oh, probably from the shelves,” Tom said. “It’d be too hard in the stockroom—everything’s still in boxes.”

  “Then let’s go shopping. I’ll do the dirty work while you keep an eye on the progression of things.”

  He gave me the car keys and we headed into the store, grabbing a cart at the entrance. It was 12:30, which meant the deliveries would go out in about half an hour. Our hope was that Gerald—or whoever—would be filling those orders right now.

  Tom and I split up inside, but he was back in my row in less than a minute, a huge smile on his face.

  “Like candy from a baby,” he whispered.

  Together we pushed the cart to the aisle where a young man standing with a clipboard was pulling cans of soup and putting them in a cart. He went from there to the bread section, grabbed two loaves, and then checked something off on his list.

  Tom and I split up again, and I crossed to the frozen foods, where I could watch the fellow without him realizing it. He made his way up and down a few more aisles and then made a final notation on the clipboard, removed the paper he had been writing on, and put it down in the cart. Then he rolled it over to the front corner of the store, next to the manager’s station, and left it there beside two other full carts. As I watched, he got another empty cart and went back to the shelves again.

  I ambled over to the three carts, each of which had a piece of paper in it, a typed list of foods with different items circled and checked off. On the paper in the middle cart was the name “Streep.”

  Yes!

  Heart pounding, I acted as though I were looking at the batteries for sale on the wall over the carts, when in fact I was desperately scanning the items that were in Dianne’s cart, trying to decide what we might be able to use for the bugs.

  For the bugs.

  I blinked, surpressing a laugh at the irony: In the Streeps’ cart was a pack of Raid ant baits.

  For bugs!

  Quickly, I turned and went back toward the correct aisle, my heart literally hammering away in my chest. I caught Tom’s eye, found the aisle I wanted, and grabbed two packs of Raid ant baits.

  I held them at an angle that Tom could see what I was getting, and his eyes widened. He nodded, also barely containing a smile. I took a few extra boxes and then walked past him to the “Sundries” aisle and grabbed a glue stick, tweezers, and a pair of fingernail scissors. Then I went to the checkout, paid, and tried not to run as I made my way back to the car.

  Time was of the essence.

  The hardest part was getting the box of ant baits open without tearing anything. I took a deep breath and let it out, trying to have patience as I slid one side of the flat scissors under the cardboard flap. Once I got the box open, I pulled out the contents: eight little plastic ant baits, a sheet of instructions, and a little pad of sticky pads for affixing the traps in place.

  I put the pads and the instructions back in the box and then concentrated on the ant baits. I hated the thought of touching the insecticide with my bare hands, but I had no other choice. I thought I could run my finger through the small hole on the side of a bait, pop loose the little pellet of ant poison, and replace it with a bug.

  No such luck. For one thing, the holes on the sides were too small to fit my finger through.

  I needed to know what the baits looked like inside, so I used the fingernail scissors to cut open a bait. I was expecting to find a little hard, round pellet of insecticide in there, but instead the disk contained a gooey substance that looked a lot like peanut butter.

  I took a second bait and cut it open more carefully, peeling back the top to expose the brown goo inside. I put one of the bugs directly on the goo and then closed the plastic flap. At least it fit, but even with the glue stick, I couldn’t get the trap to look as though it hadn’t been tampered with.

  I tried again. This time, I used the scissors to widen the hole on one of the sides. Finally, I was able to get the hole big enough so I could slip the dime-sized transmitter in from the side without having to cut the whole thing open. Using the tweezers, I slid the bug into place, glad to feel that the sticky substance inside would hold it there.

  Perfect. If you didn’t look too closely, you’d never notice that one hole was slightly bigger than the rest.

  Sweating in the hot car, I repeated the process until I had inserted a bug in eight disks. Then I put the whole pack into the box, carefully rubbed the glue stick across the end, and sealed it back. If someone knew what they were looking for, they could probably tell the thing had been tampered with. But to the eye of someone who had no idea that something was going on, it seemed harmless enough.

  I called Tom on his cell phone.

  “Done,” I said when he answered. “What’s the status?”

  “I’ll come out,” he replied.

  He met me at the car, informing me that it looked as though there would be six deliveries total. All of the groceries had been rung up and bagged and brought into the back of the store. Tom had been about to alert me to that fact when Gerald came back inside and started loading the frozen and refrigerated items into a special ice chest. That’s what he was doing now.

  “I would imagine once he’s finished loading the frozen foods, he’ll head out.”

&nb
sp; “I guess we’ll have to wait, then,” I said, “and somehow do the switch on the road.”

  “Guess so.”

  We moved the car again, this time so we could see the back of the store without being obvious. There was an old station wagon out there, just being loaded with the groceries. Before long, Gerald got in the car and started it up.

  I wanted to take over at the wheel because I was trained in tailing vehicles and Tom was not. But as I hadn’t yet driven on the left side of the road, we agreed that things should stay as they were.

  “How about I’ll backseat drive you?” I said. “Just do everything exactly as I say.”

  “Works for me.”

  I had him pull out onto the road with three other cars between the station wagon and us. Since Gerald would be making deliveries to different houses, our hope was that one of them would afford us the opportunity to switch my box of ant traps for the one in Dianne’s bag.

  As we followed along, I knew we had two things in our favor: There weren’t very many roads on St. John, so the chances of losing him weren’t high; and he would have no expectation of being followed, so our chances of being spotted were low.

  Following my instructions, Tom successfully tailed the guy to his first two deliveries, though both times the houses in question were up winding, private driveways where we couldn’t follow. After the second delivery, Gerald seemed to be heading over the mountains to the other end of the island, and I was afraid that Dianne’s delivery might be next.

  Fortunately, when we reached the highest point of the road, the station wagon slowed and put on its blinker to turn right into a parking lot.

  “Park on the other side of that van,” I said softly.

  Tom did as I directed, and as we pulled in I watched Gerald getting out of his car with two big bags of what looked like bread loaves in each hand.

  “Stall him away from the car,” I said emphatically.

  “I’ll try.”

  Tom walked behind the man as he moved toward a little open-air roadside restaurant. My guess was that Gerald would hand the bread to someone inside and then immediately come back out, catching me as I was breaking into his car. Taking a deep breath, I waited until he was talking with the bartender at the counter before I walked over to the station wagon and tried the door. It was unlocked.