Holly had arrived seven weeks early, a tiny, shriveled, pale thing who’d grown over three years into a black-haired, vivacious miracle, full of life and energy and sunshine. Because of medical complications, she was the only child Gretchen would ever have.
Gretchen’s phone kicked over to voice mail, and Gillian closed her eyes at the singsong lilt of Holly’s voice. “We isn’t here right now. Leaves a mestige…a what, Mommy?” Then a giggle before the beep.
Gillian left a quick “How are you? Just checking in.” message and repeated the lie she’d told her parents about going on vacation with Vivian. “If anything happens and you need to talk, call my cell.” She couldn’t think of anything else to say that wouldn’t make Gretchen alarmed or suspicious.
Gillian ended the call, exited the truck, and went into the busy little marina-gift-shop-turned-convenience-store-turned-office. A bottle of bourbon and five minutes later, she stood on the dock next to The Evangeline, screwing up her courage.
If she told Shane the truth and he still wanted out—and who would blame him?—what in God’s name was she going to do?
“You might as well come aboard.”
She looked across the deck from bow to stern, finally spotting Shane on top of the pilothouse. He’d changed into a pair of baggy olive-green shorts that hung a little low on his hips and nothing else that she could see. Not that she hadn’t already—all the rest, except what had been wrapped in chocolate-themed boxers.
She held up the bottle. “I brought a peace offering.”
His voice dripped cynicism. “That’s all you brought? No more bags of cash?”
Gillian took a deep breath and dove in. “The cash, plus some bourbon and the truth, if you’ll hear me out.”
After a long pause and a skeptical look, he said, “Come on, then.”
He disappeared from view and a few seconds later emerged from the door that led both to the pilothouse and to his master suite. It really was a nice boat. Not fancy, but comfortable.
She walked across the gangway and had gotten almost to the deck rail when a bell sounded from the boat moored at the next slip, surprising her. She twisted to see the source of the noise and tripped.
The fall seemed impossibly slow, although Gillian’s rational mind told her it happened in a matter of seconds. The bottle of Jack Daniels sailed toward the bow while the rest of her lurched toward the stern. Then her eyes latched onto a close-up of tanned skin stretched over firm pecs; Shane had caught her.
His hands grasped her waist and she had a shameful urge to rest her cheek against his chest. He smelled like the sun and some kind of citrus-based soap or tanning lotion, and she could feel his heart speed up.
Shane didn’t seem any more anxious to let the moment pass than Gillian, but she finally stepped back and broke contact. He looked down at the broken bottle of Jack Daniel’s Black Label, glass and amber liquid spreading across the wooden deck like diamond-studded honey.
“That is a pity.” He shifted his focus back to her. “You’re a danger on two legs, you know that? Anyone ever called you a klutz?”
Gillian smiled. “Thanks for catching me instead of old Jack over there. And everyone knows I’m a klutz. My dad always said it was a miracle I learned to walk at all, for all the falling I did.” She leaned over and picked up one of the larger pieces of glass. “Show me where the supplies are and I’ll clean this up.”
“Later.” Shane took her elbow and propelled her past the bourbon puddle and toward the hatch door. “You wanna talk up top or inside?”
Gillian thought about Son of Tex and his gun, running around somewhere on Way Key. “Inside,” she said. “You never know who might be listening. Is Jagger here?”
“No.” Shane opened the door and motioned her inside. “Take a left down the hallway. We’ll talk in the salon.”
She followed the narrow hallway to the rear of the boat and was surprised when it opened onto a large room that held booth seats upholstered in gray stripes, built-in tables of the same honey-golden wood she’d seen in the pilothouse, and a well-outfitted kitchen. “The Evangeline doesn’t look this big from the outside.”
Shane pulled a couple of sodas from the small refrigerator tucked beneath a counter. “It’s forty-six feet, but whoever planned the interior space was a genius. Every inch is used well.” He held up a regular and diet soda.
“Diet, thanks.” Gillian took the can and popped the tab. The carbonation didn’t mix well with the acid churning in her stomach. She needed to get this conversation finished. Get things settled.
Shane motioned to the benches and they sat facing each other with one of the small tables between them. She set the leather messenger bag with the money on the table. The seconds ticked by, each a heavier weight than the one before.
“Well?” Shane crossed his arms over his chest. “This is your dime, but my time isn’t unlimited.”
Gillian nodded. “I’m not sure where to start, but I guess I’ll begin with my friend Vivian’s car wreck, the one I at first thought was an accident but then learned otherwise.”
She went through it all. Every conversation with Tex. The threats. The bank account. The money left on the steps of her trailer. The attempts to track Tex down with the phone company and the sheriff’s office.
When she began the story, Shane did a lot of grimacing and eye rolling. She wasn’t sure at what point he started believing her, but by the time she got to the part about the guy with the gun sitting at the bar in Harley’s, he uncrossed his arms and leaned forward.
“I noticed that guy. Harley’s doesn’t pick up much tourist trade—basically because it looks like a dive.” Shane frowned. “Well, it is a dive. But that guy wasn’t even trying to blend in, so he wanted you to know he was there. Has he followed you anywhere else?”
Gillian shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe. But he was there today to make sure you took the dive job. After you and Jagger left…” God, she hated to tell him the rest.
Shane reached out and took her hand, and when he spoke, his voice was gentle. “After we left, what? He threatened you?”
“Not me. You and Jagger. He said if you didn’t do the dive, he’d find someone else for me to work with and I’d have your deaths on my conscience.”
“Did he now.” It wasn’t a question. Shane had turned into a thundercloud with a face. “He might find he’s threatening the wrong guys.”
He got up and walked to the kitchen, his movements slow and deliberate. He poured the rest of his soda down the sink. Leaned against the counter with his arms crossed over his chest. Looked down. His face was a mask, carefully composed and revealing nothing.
“Go home, Gillian.”
Her heart sank. “Shane, he wasn’t making idle threats. I really—”
“I’m not saying no. I just need to think. I need to talk to Jagger because he’s been dragged into this too, and he deserves a vote. Leave me your phone number.”
A tiny ember of hope sparked to life in Gillian’s gut. He hadn’t said no. She pulled out one of her Florida Wildlife Commission business cards, jotted her cell number on the back, and pushed it to the center of the table. “I rented a cottage across the key, behind the airport.” She paused, not wanting to push but needing to. “You won’t wait too long to decide, will you?”
Shane finally looked up at her, his brows in an angry line above fierce green eyes. “I know; twenty-seven days.”
CHAPTER 8
Only once in his life had Shane felt more helpless, less in control of his destiny. That time, he’d deserved it and more. This time, he hadn’t done anything wrong.
Or maybe God was still punishing him for ten years ago, the Almighty’s idea of an almighty big joke. Yeah, see old Shane Burke down there, St. Peter? He thinks he’s socked himself away in the middle of nowhere, where he won’t be responsible for anyone but himself. So let’s throw him a little curve ball. Let’s make him responsible for not only his best friend’s life, but a little kid’s and a woman�
�s. And, just for kicks, let’s give him the hots for the woman.
Thanks, and amen. He hoped God was enjoying the joke.
Shane took a curve too fast and skidded his beat-up Jeep off the narrow road, lurching to a stop less than a hand’s width from the trunk of a massive live oak. Fuck! He beat his fists on the steering wheel and then rested his forehead on it and closed his eyes.
He hadn’t sent Gillian home because he needed the time to think; he’d just wanted to get rid of her so he could have a drink. Except he’d poured the whiskey into the glass, looked at it for a good minute or two, and then poured it down the sink while his taste buds mourned.
Because he had to help her; he’d known from about halfway through her story that bailing wasn’t an option. And he had to be sober when he did it or he’d fuck everything up. He might fuck everything up anyway, but at least he’d do it sober.
Maybe it was all a big, sick joke—that’s what he’d thought at first. Maybe her friend’s accident had been nothing more than an accident. Maybe a simple computer glitch had temporarily frozen her bank account. Maybe “Tex” and his buddy at Harley’s and their boss, whoever he or she was, were nothing but sadistic freaks.
But they’d had photos of the kid. Knew what she was wearing, where she lived, where she attended daycare.
They’d known about him. About his financial situation, that he had the technical skills to do the dive and that he might be desperate enough to jump at the cash.
Who had access to that kind of information on private citizens, especially private citizens in rural Florida? They’d found Gillian through that local-yokel TV interview, which was bizarre unless someone were doing regular searches for things related to the Knights Templars. Anyone savvy enough to do a search for certified technical divers in this area could probably have come up with his name.
But to get that much intel that quickly after Gillian’s interview had broadcast? It took someone with a lot of money, a lot of power, and not many scruples.
Even if Shane had been able to walk away from the threat to the child, he’d unwittingly dragged Jagger into this mess. He didn’t give a shit what happened to himself, but he cared a lot about his friend.
They’d been buddies since Shane’s Marine Corps days in San Diego. When he’d had free weekends, which wasn’t often, he’d leave Camp Pendleton and drive down to La Jolla for the cave diving. Jagger, two years younger, was in college in San Diego and would go to La Jolla on weekends for the surfing.
On the surface, he guessed the Marine and the hippie had made an odd twosome, but they had a lot in common. Both had grown up with commercial fishermen and the whole culture surrounding the industry. They were more comfortable on water than land.
When he’d run into trouble, gotten discharged, and started drinking too much, it was Jagger who’d convinced Shane to come with him to Cedar Key. His dad was fighting cancer and he wanted to be with him in his last days. Shane hadn’t known where else to go.
He wasn’t going to let this ridiculous game destroy his friend. And the “rules” comment Gillian had shared made him think it was a game to whatever sick fucks were behind this.
After he calmed down, he drove to the little wooden shack—“cottage” was too grand a word—Jagger had inherited from his father. Cal Mackie had built the thing himself after its predecessor had been flattened by a hurricane in the eighties, saying it made no sense to put a lot of money into housing that was just going to get bulldozed by a force of nature every decade or two.
In a nod to the Stones’ “Paint It Black,” Jagger had coated the house in dark-charcoal exterior latex with a bright-red door. Shane’s buddy marched to his own drummer, and it wasn’t always Charlie Watts.
Jagger opened the door before Shane reached it. “I had a visit from our friend Gillian,” he told him, raising his voice to be heard over the countrified tones of “Sweet Virginia.”
Jagger raised his eyebrows. “Did she break down and tell you the truth? And did you believe her?”
“Yeah, and you’re gonna need to sit down for this one.”
A few minutes’ worth of talking later, Jagger poured out his beer and turned off the sound system that had been blaring out “Exile on Main Street.” “Even Mick has to shut up sometimes,” he said, shrugging as he sat in his dad’s old recliner and popped the footrest up. “Man, this is seriously screwed up. It’s too damned creepy not to be true.”
Shane slumped down on his end of the sofa and propped his feet on the scarred brown coffee table. “I thought so too.” He tried to figure out a polite way to say what he wanted to say, but polite had never been one of his skills. He took out a black pouch he’d brought with him from the Jeep. He’d stuffed it full of money from Gillian’s stash, which she’d insisted on leaving on The Evangeline.
“Look, I want you to take this and get lost for the next thirty days. Cover your tracks and stay out of sight until this is over, one way or another.”
Jagger leaned over and snagged the pouch with one hand, unfastened its velcro straps, and looked inside. “Cool. Always did like Ben Franklin.” He slowly refastened the straps, then lobbed it at Shane’s head hard enough that it hurt when it clocked him in the mouth.
“Ow.” Shane touched a finger to his lip and it came back bloody. “What was that for?”
“Go fuck yourself. You can’t do this alone. You need me.”
“I…” Shane closed his eyes. Damn it, he did need Jagger, not just for moral support but to get The Evangeline refitted and stocked. “I just don’t…”
He slumped down farther on the sofa. “Whatever.”
Jagger laughed. “You are such a caveman. You need to get in touch with your inner warm side so you can express yourself in more than one-syllable words.”
“So now you’re Martha-fucking-Stewart?”
“Does this house look like Martha’s been anywhere near it?”
Every surface except the ones they sat on—and the pristine sound system—supported pyramids of clothes, mountains of take-out boxes, and stacks of books. Shane stuck his tongue to his lip to see if it was still bleeding. “You have a point.”
Jagger leaned forward. “Here’s the deal, Lucille. You don’t want me to get hurt. I know that. You don’t want to go through a repeat of when Kevin died, but you’ve gotta put that shit behind you and realize it’s not the same scenario—even if you had done something wrong back then, which you didn’t.”
“I—”
“Shut up, Shane.” Jagger pulled his hair back into a tail and snapped the elastic band on it that he usually wore around his wrist so he wouldn’t lose it. “This isn’t up for negotiation. I’m in. Just tell me what’s next.”
Shit. On some selfish, asshole level, he was relieved. “You got a calendar?”
They spent the next half hour looking at dates. “Everything’s going to have to fall perfectly into place for this to happen,” Shane finally said, sitting back and rolling his shoulders to loosen up the muscles grown stiff from bending over the coffee table.
“Assuming Gillian’s right and the ship went down near Louisbourg, it sure would be helpful to have somebody in place who had everything ready for us by the time we got there.” Jagger stretched and propped up the recliner footrest again. “I don’t have any of my dad’s old contacts, though.”
Shane finally entertained a thought that had been trying to nudge its way into his head all afternoon. He’d been ignoring it, but now he had to let it out. “Damn it, I might have to call Charlie.”
After his dive partner Kevin died, Shane had gone back to Charlie’s retirement spot in North Carolina, south of Wilmington. His head had been too screwed up to accept Charlie’s tough love, and Shane had walked out. He hadn’t talked to his uncle since.
“Think he’ll talk to you? He probably still knows some guys up north.”
Yeah, he probably did. Whether he’d talk to his long-lost nephew was another matter. “All I can do is try. In the meantime, start making a
list of supplies to buy and what retrofitting you know we’ll need besides the stuff we’ve talked about. Tomorrow, we’re going to have to toss around a whole lot of money to get work done fast.”
“Will do.” Jagger leaned back and flipped the Stones back on, albeit at a lower volume. “One thing that will help is that we’re going into the off-season, even for the Gulf. So it might be easier to find workers.”
Shane hefted himself off the sofa. “While you work on lists, I’ll go and let Gillian know we’re in, if not exactly by choice.” Except a part of him felt as if it had awakened from a long sleep and was excited to be back in action, which was pathetic. “She said she had a trunk of old family stuff with her; maybe we can get some more clues as to where the Marcus Aurelius went down.” Jagger didn’t answer; he already had his head bent low over a notebook and was writing at a fast clip.
Shane let himself out and drove across the key toward the little airport—a fancy name for a couple of short runways that often had seagulls walking across them, no terminal or control tower, and room for four single-engine planes. Several cottages sat along a narrow strip of land beside the runway, convenient for visitors who wanted to fly in and walk a few hundred feet to their rental accommodations.
He eased his Jeep along a road barely wide enough to accommodate two cars, peering through the twilight gloom until he spotted a silver pickup like the one Gillian had described as hers, sitting next to an orange rectangular house that looked like someone had plopped a crayon box down in the middle of a dense stand of live oaks and palms.
Pulling in behind the truck, Shane sat for a moment looking out at the narrow inlet and the Gulf beyond. The sunset bled vivid reflections of orange and gold and crimson onto the water, and a couple of white herons stood out in stark relief against the marsh vegetation on the little spit of land on the other side of the inlet.
There were no doors on the back side of the house facing the street, so he walked around to the waterfront side—and straight into a hellhound. Big, solid black, with bared white teeth, bristling fur, and…good God, the beast had foam coming from his snarling lips.
Lovely, Dark, and Deep (The Collectors) Page 7