Guzman lurched upward and then gasped as Alice twisted her lock again. “Stop moving. Fractures at this joint do not heal well. Let’s not destroy your tennis game, Tomas. I just want some information from you. About Sara and Peter Moore.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Sara’s friend. I told you. She sent me to talk to you.”
“Bullshit! She’s dead.”
Alice twisted harder. “Okay, genius, how do you know she didn’t send me last month, and I’m just getting into Miami today?”
“Ow! Shit. I talked to her before she died. She didn’t say anything about sending a friend to see me.”
“She was shot right in front of me! The same shooter wounded me. I followed his trail to Peter Moore’s office in Tampa and found a photo there with you in it. Sara is dead. Chances are the killer is looking for you. I found you. The killer will, too. I’m looking for him, and when I find him, I will kill him. So you should help me find him. If you want to keep enjoying your bar and this fine office.” She felt him relax a bit then.
“How do I know you didn’t kill them yourself?”
“Them? I didn’t say Peter was dead.”
Tomas said so quietly that Alice strained to hear him, “He is. I saw him killed.”
“You were there?”
“No, we had a surveillance feed. I watched it over there.” He jerked his head toward his couch.
“Had?”
“It stopped working soon after Peter's murder. The killer must have disabled it.”
Tomas wrenched his arms, not as hard as before, but Alice could feel that if she relaxed her hold, he would break free and who knows what then. She decided to try a white lie.
“Look, Tomas, Sara talked about you.” She felt a change in his body as if he were interested. Good move, she thought.
“She said I should find you here and warn you, protect you from the killer. She said you could explain something she gave me.”
“If she knew you, if she was going to send you to me, why did she never speak of you before?”
“Sara kept many secrets. She kept them from me also. I’ve known her since she was young, but she didn’t mention you until the day she was killed.”
Guzman relaxed more.
“You’ve known her since she was young?”
Alice held her breath. Jenny said that Alice knew Sara as a child, but other than the scene from the night she died, Alice could not remember any of that—except for the stories Jenny told her while she recovered. “Yes, she grew up in Oregon, in Idanha, near Willamette Springs. I knew Sara there.”
At the mention of Idanha, a flyspeck of a town in the Oregon wilderness, Guzman relaxed further. “She talked about Idanha and Willamette.”
Alice released her hold. “We have the same problem, Tomas. Let’s work together.”
Tomas got up stiffly, retrieved his knife, and threw it angrily into the wall. It stuck point-first, vibrating. Then he turned to Alice and smiled.
“I’m sorry about my outburst, Miss Valero. Is it Miss?”
“Call me Lilly.”
“Fine. Well, I apologize. First Peter and then Sara. I have been wary of strangers.”
“I’d have thought you’d have guards.”
“I do. They are out there.” He gestured with his hand. He held out his cell phone. “I push this button to call them and this one to let them know I’m all right.” He pushed the second button. “They’d have been in here in a few minutes.”
“Why did you meet with me alone, then?”
“I must confess I didn’t think you were much of a threat. I see I was mistaken.”
“Don’t judge a book by its cover.”
“Yes, Miss Lilly, if you were a book on the shelf, I’d not take you for a story about a fighter. I see you better now. You’re in disguise.”
“I thought it’d be better to be overlooked than to be looked over.”
Guzman nodded. “Well, Miss Lilly, it’s happy hour. Our tradition here at the Harbor Tower is to drink to the sunset. Do you care for bourbon?”
I have no idea whether I like bourbon, but I do know that if you call me Miss again, I will hit you. To be polite she said, “Yes.”
Guzman put some ice in two glasses and poured from an amber bottle labeled Knob Creek. “So, what happened to Sara?”
“She came to see me, and she gave me this.”
Alice pulled her necklace far enough out of her shirt for Guzman to see it and noted his widening eyes. “She told me to come find you here in Miami, and she was starting to say something more before she got shot.”
“She was shot? How was she shot? Forgive me for asking, but it’s important to me.”
“She got hit bad. The bullets must have been a… special kind. I was basically showered with her brains. Sorry, is that informative enough?”
“Yes, sadly it is.”
“Do you know who killed her?”
“I think I do. The same man who killed Peter Moore. An assassin named Callan Grant.”
As Guzman said the name, Alice felt as if she just noticed a poisonous snake crawling up her leg. Her breathing increased, her neck hairs rose, and her heart rate went up. The signs of an animal that hears the sound of a predator, she thought.
“An assassin? Who does he work for?”
“A man who lives here in Miami, by the name of Laird Northwin.”
Alice tried to slow her breathing.
“How much about Sara’s recent life did you know?”
“Not very much other than just before she was shot. I hadn’t spoken with her in years.”
Tomas sipped his bourbon. “Sara was a wonderful girl, full of life, generous. She was the sort who would bring food to people without it if she could. If she had ten dollars, she wanted to give eleven away to someone in need. If she felt she owed a friend something, she would fly to the end of the earth to pay them back.”
He must have cared for her, Alice thought.
“Yet for herself, she too often felt too little. If someone loved her, she said she was not worthy. She would take huge risks, stupid risks, to do the right thing. In many ways, she was like her father.”
“She was a very sweet friend,” Alice said.
“Yes, well, I’m going on. If she said that I could tell you what your necklace is, that I can do. However, for that we will have to go to my lab.”
“You have a lab?”
“Yes, dear, so I do. I am not just a humble barkeeper, it turns out. I have another secret life as a computer genius.”
“Really? I would never have guessed.” Alice thought it odd that someone would call himself a genius. That didn’t feel right.
“We all have our secrets. Don’t we, Lilly?”
The way he said her name had her hair rising again. Alice raised her eyebrows innocently.
“Now, if you would follow me…” Guzman put down his empty glass on the bar and started toward the door.
“Hold it! How do I know you aren’t leading me into a trap out there?”
“Well, you’ve got a gun pointed at my back, don’t you?”
How did he know that? Alice gripped the Centennial in her pocket. “It isn’t pointed at you,” she said.
“Do what you feel you need to with it. In order for me to help you with your mystery, we need to leave this room, walk through the bar, and go down the elevator to the ground floor and then around the block to my other building.”
“Okay, you walk. Do not run.”
“I understand, Lilly.”
Guzman said her name just as he opened the door, and a wave of sound rolled in. She almost thought he had said, “Lil-lie,” but that must have been her mind playing tricks, again.
He led her down the bar toward the elevator. Alice felt famished after the adrenaline rush of the day. She grabbed a handful of pretzels from a bowl. A few of the well-dressed people at the bar looked disgusted as the frumpy, overweight woman following handsome Tomas Guzman stuffed her face while
walking, crumbs dropping behind her.
Guzman didn’t seem to notice, or pretended not to, as they entered the plush, dark-wood–paneled elevator. Two drunken young women entered just after them, giggling with each other over some secret. One of them smiled shyly at Guzman. “We’re goin’ to the groun’ floor.”
Guzman smiled and, with a bit of a flourish, pressed the G button and said, “Be my guests, my ladies.”
Alice thought she heard one giggle and say, “Well, there’s no sofa in here,” but that didn’t make sense. Guzman appeared not to notice the state of the women either, smiling faintly at their antics for the short ride to the ground floor.
They all exited the building in the fading light. Outside the glass doors, she saw a red brick courtyard with the bricks laid in a herringbone pattern. Leaning on each other like the bricks, the two women veered off in the direction of the ocean while Guzman strode across the brightly-lit street. He slowed so that Alice walked just a bit behind him, turned, and asked, “You know what they say about the Miami night?”
Alice raised her eyebrows.
Guzman waved his hand. “This is where neon goes to die.”
The lights were bright beachward and along the waterfront and the side of the street they were on, with the storefronts and restaurants that took up the ground floor of Guzman’s tower. However, they were headed for the dark side of the street, where what looked like a miniature forest grew along the sidewalk, with palms, large-leaved green trees, and huge ferns hedging nearly to the concrete’s edge. As they crossed over Bayshore Drive, Guzman held out his arm, palm out, pointing the way down the street away from the ocean and into the shadows.
“This is the way we go from here.”
“How far is it?”
There seemed to be no streetlights on this side of the road, and the palms reached up like fingers, blocking the light from the buildings beyond.
“Well, we need to go until we come to the end. It’s just a block.”
Alice knew she heard something like that before but couldn’t place it.
“You first, please, Tomas.”
“Of course, my dear, of course.”
Guzman walked ahead of her, and to Alice his walk seemed more bouncy than it should, not as if he were being followed by a woman with a gun to his back at all.
She noticed a large delivery truck up ahead. The back of the truck looked like a still life, with a large bottle of water on a step and in big white letters, “Home Delivery: call 988-830-8001.” She thought that a bit of an odd number and then shook her head. Why was she noticing strange things like this? She turned back to Guzman’s back, and he seemed to be bouncing even more, almost dancing. Then as they passed the truck, it hit her; the Knob Hill had been drugged!
Breathing hard, she tried to fight the fog rising between her eyes and the world. Alice saw a flash of metal from the side of the water delivery truck. Something struck her leg, and her hand flashed down to find it as she struggled to pull the Centennial from her pocket. She saw herself brushing away a dart-like object, and her mind said, Tranquilizer… or poison!
She thought back, Thanks a lot, voice—you’re a bit late to the party.
She felt her legs going out from under her and Guzman turning to catch her. He set me up! She struggled to regain control, and it seemed for a moment her forgotten training might overcome the drugs in her system as she pushed Guzman away with a hard palm to his chest and struggled to get her feet under her. Staring at Guzman, she saw a knife suddenly sprout from his breast.
He gaped down at it, and his hands rose, feebly trying to remove it. Falling again, she managed to turn toward the bushes where the knife must have come from and saw a dark figure rising and a silenced weapon spitting fire at the delivery truck. Guzman fell faster than she did and hit the sidewalk first, letting out an anguished, racking gasp. She made one last turn to look back at the truck where the dart in her leg had come from, and she saw a Swiss-cheese pattern clustered around a hole where the barrel of the dart gun that had shot her now pointed skyward.
Then, as if she were watching from elsewhere, she saw herself falling in a spiral, spinning. With the last gasp of her consciousness, she felt strong arms gather her up as she spun into darkness.
Chapter 9, A Dream Remembered
Callan
Callan could hear the sigh of sand as the waves drew it down and then flung it back up on their return. Almost the same sound each time, it began… and ceased… and then began again. The sand washed between his toes, and girls in bikinis and maillots, and guys, some in Speedos and some in surfer shorts, played and ran and laughed in the setting sun.
After kicking the heads of his lazy team in Venice to get them back on track, he had taken his Fountain 38, a triple-engine speedboat that cruised at eighty miles per hour, over to Treasure Bay Casino on the Mississippi coast. When he made deals with his customers from the South, Callan liked to meet them at the various casinos along the Gulf Coast of Alabama to keep them away from his base of operations in Venice. He found that after some drinks and allowing them some small wins at cards, his customers tended to make deals that were more profitable for Callan. Always cautious, he visited the casinos before having meetings at them, checking escape routes, law enforcement presence, and the beauty of the waitresses.
Today, despite the idyllic scene on the shore next to the giant beached ship that gave the Casino its name, thoughts raged like a storm inside him. How had Thorn found him in Klamath? Thorn might not even be after him for the tablet. Thorn was Northwin’s dog, and Callan had been running from Northwin for years.
Callan had once carried the wolf’s head badge of Northwin’s Guardians, the private army of the Apple Creek Corporation. When he had joined, he had been told that one does not quit. Callan had left after a particularly dangerous mission when Thorn had taken all the credit and most of the bonus money.
Northwin had chased him ever since. Callan had been hiding from Northwin and had done the jobs for Franklin McAlister that Northwin would not touch.
However, Northwin never came after him with the kind of force used in Klamath. He preferred to operate with more subtlety, with small operations easy to cover up. Callan suspected that Franklin McAlister might be behind Northwin’s new fervor—Franklin and his tablet that worked so well but for the one encrypted file that, it seemed, nothing could open. I need to find the key.
First, though, he needed to take care of his problem with Northwin. For his Guardians, Northwin hired many former commandos, retired Special Forces operators, US Navy Seals, and Marines.
A tough bunch to take on.
With his until-recently successful credit card scams and gunrunning operations and the money made freelancing as an assassin, Callan felt ready to take the fight to Northwin. He knew that McAlister and Northwin were not friends. Only Robert Brandon’s firm hand kept them from each other’s throats after Sangerman died, when Northwin accused McAlister of lying about the need for the old man’s death.
Callan strolled farther into the ocean, which now rose above his knees, soaking the bottoms of his shorts. Having solved his problem in his mind brought a smile to his face. The female half of a young couple to his left smiled back at him, and the male half said, “Nice sunset, eh?” His rage settling as his planning coalesced, Callan smiled back, “Sure is.”
Just then he saw her rising out of the waves and drawing her long, black hair tightly between her fingers, straightening it, shedding water droplets like falling red pearls, shining in the last light of the sun. As he looked up, he had to shade his eyes with one hand, and the woman he saw then mirrored the long, dark hair, the sweet, heart-shaped face, and the brown, lithe limbs of Sara Moore.
Callan wiped his eyes. The woman wading in his direction could not be Sara. He had watched her die at Bonneville Dam. As the woman passed by, she looked at him, and the likeness dropped away. She is just someone who looks like Sara, like she looked when I first met her.
Long-suppressed em
otion flooded him, and he remembered back to when he had first seen the real Sara in San Francisco, at the Museum of Modern Art—at a wine exhibit, of all things, with exotic labels, tasting, the works. Back then, Callan had still worked for Northwin, and he often had to meet with Thorn to plan various jobs. Most of the jobs Northwin had for Callan back then were dirty. Dirty and wet.
***
Sara actually attended the wine exhibit looking for bottles to bring back to her boss in Tampa. A connoisseur. So she said.
That damp, cold, gray summer morning, he had arrived early to check out the location of the meeting. They might both have worked for Northwin, but Callan did not trust Thorn and had known that feeling was returned. That time, Thorn clearly had not looked at the museum’s schedule for the day he suggested they meet there as, instead of the usual few straggly artist types gaping at the strange exhibits on a weekday afternoon, the free wine and snacks had gathered a diverse crowd.
Along with the crowd problem, he found a dusky, dark-eyed woman playing with her hair and looking at a Japanese manga book with a bottle beside it. She wore a long, forest-green leather coat/dress buttoned over her slim waist and calf-high black-snakeskin boots. As far as Callan could tell, she wore nothing else besides a black, beaded necklace. He walked up next to her, and she turned as if she expected him. She asked what he thought of the book and the bottle.
Not having looked closely at the book at all, he needed a second to take it in. He saw on the open page a drawing of a wine named Screaming Eagle. Around it, characters were speaking in oriental symbols. Despite his mother’s best efforts, Japanese was not one of his languages, so he could not tell why the wine was in the book, nor if the cartoons were praising it or cursing it.
“I have no idea. I can’t read Japanese. Nice label, though.” He grinned. “I like eagles.”
She looked at him closely. “Yet you are part Japanese?”
He laughed at that. “Yes, long ago, my mother came from the islands. I have never been myself.”
“You look as though you know what things cost. Do you know what that bottle is worth?”
The Gift of the Dragon Page 10