She thrust the sadness from her mind, letting another feeling replace it. She longed for him to turn and take her in his arms and kiss her tears away. The feeling shocked her. Since her accident, since Sara’s murder, she had felt nothing for the soft, happy men she had met at Willamette Springs.
Nothing for the wild, adventurous ones either. Nor for the muscular lawyer celebrating his big court win, nor a wild-haired man more tan than Jacob who had sold a large amount of some illegal goods and roared through Willamette for a soak in the springs before heading to the city.
A famous—according to Jenny—funnyman had come to the springs after giving a show in Portland. He had left her rolling on the dirt floor of the community yurt with laughter. None of them had stirred in Alice more than the appreciative sort of attraction she also felt looking at a nice painting or a sunset. She realized her eyes were closed. She opened them to see Jacob looking at her intently. She opened her eyes wider, her jaw dropping open at the surprise of her feeling and the surprise of being discovered feeling it. She blushed and looked down at the sand-covered deck of the boat.
“What are you looking at?”
“You. Look back at me, Alice.”
She glared at him then, suddenly angry. “Okay, I’m looking.”
He moved almost as fast as she could, and he stood in front of her. “Alice,” he said.
She closed her eyes again as he kissed her.
She shuddered and thought for a second that she would fall down. He touched her face with his hand, and sparks seemed to leap from her cheek down to her stomach. She felt him hesitate. He feels it too, she thought. It is too powerful for him. She opened her eyes and saw him looking down at her with that intent look again. Then he gently cupped her cheek, and she opened her lips. He brushed his lips against hers, and more sparks flew.
Yes, she thought, take away the sadness. Let me feel nothing but this. He tilted her head back and covered her mouth with his. Shaking, she felt his tongue move between her willing lips, warm, soft. The singer repeated, “Ooh ooh," and so did she. The taste of the man filled her up, and her thoughts dissolved into a hot, warm place as she squinted over his shoulder into the red heat of the September sun.
Naked and hot, Alice stared up at the rough cabin ceiling. She lay next to Jacob in what would be a pleasant afterglow if the poorly ventilated cabin weren't so close in temperature to Hell in the late afternoon. Down on her belly, she could see streams of sweat popping out of her skin as if she were a field full of springs. It ran down in tiny rivers and contributed to the sogginess of the rough fishing boat mattress she lay on.
“Whew.” Jacob reached up and opened the large square port in the top of the cabin, which let some slightly cooler air in. He also switched on a small electric fan bolted to the roof. That made it a little closer to bearable.
“Well, Mr. Castellan, I have to say I’m a little shocked with myself. Of course after what we have just been through, it’s surprising I haven’t gone completely insane.” She stared up at the fiberglass ceiling of the boat cabin. It had a rough, corrugated pattern, and there were pockets of darkness in the hollows. Probably mildew.
“Yeah,” was all he said.
Alice felt her eyebrows furrowing. “Jacob, I’ve no idea if I am the kind of girl to sleep with someone I don’t know very well. Something came over me. Obviously, it came over you too.” She thought she had made a big mistake. He might act weird now.
“It happens when two people are involved in a dangerous situation, Alice. I mean—it doesn’t always. But it can.”
That made her angry. She didn’t know why. “This happened to you before? The last time you saw your sister killed?” Alice instantly regretted saying that. “I’m sorry, Jacob. Impulse control is one of the things I have trouble with since this.” She touched her head. She looked at him now. He looked hurt.
“No problem, hon—Alice.”
“Did you almost call me honey?”
“Sorry.”
I am not ready for this! “Look, I just need to get back to Miami and get my things. I need to find out who killed Sara and what this is for.” She grabbed the necklace from the side of the boat’s queen-size bed, where she had tucked it under the mattress. She sat up and put it back around her neck. It felt hot against her skin.
“You haven’t told me what happened with Sara.”
Yes, change the subject, please! “I don’t really know for sure. I only remember flashes from that night. I remember seeing her get shot.” Her throat closed and her eyes filled with tears. “He shot her right in front of me, and her blood, her brains, got all over me.” Jacob put his arms around her. She let him. After a bit, she could talk again. “My friend, Jenny, found me almost dead along the side of the river with this.” Alice touched the necklace. “I can’t remember being in the river or getting out of it. The first thing I recall after Sara’s murder is waking up at Jenny’s place a few days later.”
“You don’t remember what the man looked like at all?”
Alice called up the memory again. She found no more there than before, as before she had seen brief flashes in a smoky glass. She remembered Jenny saying that her kind of memory loss sometimes got better on its own, but sometimes it never healed. “Dark hair, dark eyes. Asian but tall. That is what I told Jenny when she found me.”
“I think the same people who killed Nanette and Anna also killed your friend.”
“Why?”
“Guzman was told you were after him, that you killed Moore.”
“Yeah, you told me that. That I can remember.”
“You remember everything that happened after you were shot?”
“And a little just before it. Jenny called it ‘retrograde amnesia.’ She’s a doctor. She said that it happens sometimes after head wounds. The memories that are lost depend on what parts of the brain got hurt.”
“People I knew in the service got shot in the head. I remember some of them had memory loss. It comes back, right?”
“Sometimes. I don’t want to talk about that anymore, okay?” Alice yawned. “What were we talking about before we started on my head?”
“You didn’t go to the police about Sara?”
“I left a bag with money and some letters with my friend Jenny.”
“The doctor?”
“Yeah. One of the letters was one I wrote to send to Sara. In it was a reminder not to involve the police. Of course, I didn’t say why. Jenny also asked me that. After she found me, after I woke up, she said she would’ve called the police, but I told her not to.”
“You don’t remember why, though.”
“No shit.” I said I didn’t want to talk about my memory problems! “And the letter I wrote to Sara didn’t say why either. It seemed as if it were something we both understood.”
“Okay. Well, I don’t think you killed Peter Moore.”
“Of course not!”
“So why would someone tell Guzman you were the killer?”
“Like I know?”
“Well, I think it is because they suspected you would go to him.”
“Because they left the picture with him in it for me to find? His office in Tampa was pretty much cleaned out except for that.”
“There was no other evidence there?”
“Well, I’m not Abby from NCIS.” In her hotel in Fort Myers, she had watched a show about a woman who always found a clue when no one else could. “But I couldn't find anything else. I looked carefully before some crazy person tried to kill me.”
“Wait, someone else tried to kill you this week? You didn’t tell me about that.”
“No, I didn’t. It’s not as though we’ve had lots of time to get to know each other, Jacob.”
Jacob looked away. “Right. Well, Thorn, the guy you shocked in the balls back there,”— Alice grinned at that memory—“he said something about my getting in the way of his plans to pick you up. I never heard anything about Guzman working with anyone like Thorn when I was in his operation.
My guess is that Thorn planted the information about you and was planning to take you off Guzman’s hands.”
“So Tomas was basically bait?”
“Yeah, I think they left the picture in Moore’s office, hoping you would come looking for answers. Then, they just had to wait until Guzman told them he heard from you.”
“It looked as though Thorn was killed when his boat hit those coral lumps.”
“Coral heads. His team was the teeth, not the brains. He was calling someone from Nanette’s.” Jacob’s voice broke, and Alice put her hand on his leg. “Most likely, he was calling his boss.”
“Laird Northwin. Can we get to him?”
“Maybe. When we get back to Miami, I can ping someone I still know at the Bureau. Maybe he can help. When I find a phone—”
Ami! “I have a phone in my rental car.”
“Great. Well, that will save time.” Jacob grinned at her.
“But I don’t want to go to the police!”
“I can ask him to look into it for me without turning it into a federal case. He owes me.”
“Well, I guess I won’t be able to ditch you as soon as we get to Miami, so that leaves option two. Work with you. For a while at least.”
“Sure, well, I might be of some help. Former FBI agent and all.” His voice sounded hollow. Alice felt a little sorry, but then thought, Does he really feel that having sex once makes us partners?
“Jacob, I’ve brought you enough trouble. You’d be smart to ditch me and let me figure this out on my own. It makes sense for me to work with you, but not for you to work with me!”
“I got fired trying to find out what happened to your father. I need to prove I was right, at least to myself! And we can get justice for Nanette and Anna. You are the best chance of that I have. We have the same enemies. We should fight them together.”
“I don’t want to get any more people killed.” Or kill anyone else!
“Me either, Alice. So, shall we head for Miami? Or you still want me to drop you off?”
“Miami.”
“Okay. Well, let's get this bucket of bolts started, then!”
“Should I get out and push?”
Jacob started the right motor without her help. He said that even with his changes to the motor’s tuning, he only wanted to run one at a time at night to throw off any more attempts to detect them from the air. Jacob showed her a line on the Humminbird GPS unit. “We’ll head along the edge of Florida Bay, and we’ll pick up the intracoastal waterway here by this Key.”
Alice looked more closely at the island that he zoomed into on the GPS’s screen. “What’s the name of that place?”
“Dildo Key,” Jacob said, grinning.
“What!”
“It is named for a cactus that grows there. I guess you wouldn’t want to use it, though.”
“Use what?”
“The cactus. For a dildo,” Jacob deadpanned.
They both burst out laughing.
“Dirty mind!” She hit him in the arm.
Jacob looked at her. “So you can remember what things are, but not who people are?”
“Right. It’s weird. People in my life I can’t remember. Some other things I can’t figure out. That might just be because part of my brain is gone, though. I don’t like to talk about it.” For the I-forget-how-many-eth time!
“So anyway, we’ll hit the ICW here and head south and then take the northern channel, past Shell Key, past Largo. There is a long bridge at the northern end of Key Largo called Card Sound Bridge. We can spend the day under the bridge, pretend to fish.”
“Pretend? Can we actually fish?”
Jacob looked at her. “Hungry?”
Alice nodded.
“I don’t have any good way to cook fish on here. There is actually a fish fry restaurant there called Alabama Jacks. We could anchor the boat and hike on over there for some real food. You can get a Red Bull there, also.”
Alice nodded vigorously and noticed her breasts shaking along. “We should get dressed first.”
“Good idea. Key Largo is not Key West.”
After they pulled their clothes back on, Jacob went up on the bow of the boat and hauled in the anchor. She could barely see him through the shine of the low-riding sun. They were pointed west out of the narrow channel in the mangroves, and with the red sunset, it looked as if they were in a tunnel that ended in a pit of fire. The wind died as the sun moved closer to the horizon, and the waves that had been choppy before were now smoothed as if the sea were well-polished marble—slightly translucent marble that let the crimson sun shine through the soft peaks of the waves. Alice found her eyes watering. Jacob’s moving forward rocked the boat a little, and she put a hand on the metal frame, holding on to the hard top of the boat to steady herself. She realized she hadn’t eaten in some time.
A green box of cinnamon granola bars sat on the seat. Jacob was stowing the anchor in the chain locker in the bow of the boat. He faced her now, and he grinned. She gestured at the box, and then, realizing they were too low for him to see from his vantage point, she held them up, her face a question. He nodded, and she heard him shout, “Go for it,” above the rumbling motor. Suddenly famished, she grabbed a green bar from the box and tore it open. It seemed a long time since she had tasted anything sweet.
Franklin
He opened the drawer on his desk slightly and saw two buttons, one green and one red. If he pushed the red one, his secretary would tell anyone waiting to see him that she needed to cancel his or her appointment and reschedule. Franklin pushed the green button. In a few moments, his oldest son Ian came sauntering through the door, dressed in a white suit with a pink tie like an undercover cop on a TV show.
“You look as though you just came off a movie set.”
“Why, thank you, Father. You look like you just came from the set of a show about an ad agency in the nineteen fifties.”
“That was a good decade.”
Ian looked around the room, from the wood-paneled walls to the frosted glass doors to the blue-gray carpet.
“You haven’t had this place redecorated since then.”
“Well, if you were here more, I might try to furnish it to meet your tastes.”
“Ah, Father, you know that until recently my duties with our fearless leader had kept me up in New York. Now that poor Robert has passed away or, more accurately, been torn limb from limb, I may have more time down here. Of course, I still have my family duties to my sweet sister and her brood.”
“Yes, well, we have to talk to Ayn about moving down here now that Robert is gone.”
“She won’t like that. She barely finds New York amusing enough.”
“I won’t have my… grandchildren,” Franklin almost choked on the word as he noticed Ian had left the office door open and he could see his secretary’s ear through the doorway. “I won’t have them raised in New York. We have a beautiful place here. It is the best thing for them.” He pushed a button under his desk, and the office door closed with a soft click.
Franklin noticed his son’s face seemed to be working to stay still. “You were going to say something funny? Go ahead, say something funny.”
Ian looked out the window and took a breath. “How did it go with Grant?”
“I just got done speaking with him. He has the bit in his teeth, now.”
“We have his location?”
“Yes. He thought he had smashed the tracker Trevor’s unfortunate girl had planted. There is a GAJT anti-jammer and the real tracker and recorder hidden in the fake device’s battery. Our nano-tech division did a great job with making it compact and tough. In a few years, we will offer devices like it to the US Military at a thousand percent mark-up.”
“Let me go!” A gleam in his ice blue eyes, Ian McAlister leaned on his father’s desk.
“Calm down, Ian. You look like that puppy Trevor once had. We have larger plans. Besides, you already got a shot at him and failed.”
Ian banged his hand on
the big desk. “With a crew of half-trained fools! He’s alone on his boat. I can take him myself. There will be no one to make a mistake.”
“There is no way you could get down there before he comes into land. Then he will be in his compound, with his men, on his own turf. We can not afford to have you fail again. It does not matter anyway, Ian. My plan will take care of Callan, the tablet, and our other problems.”
Ian spun around, his hands out, still pleading. “I can get him this time!”
“You will get them. Callan, Alice, and… Laird. Three birds in one bush. I need you to throw the stone.”
Ian snapped out of his small tantrum. “What do you mean?”
Franklin pulled out an iPad and opened up an aerial photo of downtown Miami.
Jacob
Alice made a delighted sound when they found her rented Ford Fusion still parked in the garage at Central Parking.
Looking at her shorts, which clearly carried no car keys in them, Jacob said, “How are you going to get in?”
“Well, I may not be a former FBI agent, but I think of things. Ami helped me work out the details. They make these magnetic key-holders.” Alice knelt down by the left front wheel and put her hand under the fender. She emerged holding the car’s key with a triumphant look. She unlocked the doors and opened the passenger side door, motioning Jacob to get in.
Getting in the driver’s side, Alice reached under the seat and pulled out the phone. It was dead, with no charge. Frowning, she grabbed a cloth shopping bag from the back with “Trader Joe's” printed on the side. She pulled a charger from the bag and plugged the phone into the car’s electric socket.
Alice’s phone made a dong sound as it started up. “Okay, here it goes. See whether you can find out about Michel Thorn.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Jacob. He stared at the unfamiliar interface for a bit. “Sorry, I have an iPhone.”
“Hit the green button. Don’t iPhones have green buttons to call?”
Jacob ignored her question and, locating the dialing interface, punched in a number. He swore and canceled as it dialed the wrong number. Then he tried again. On his third try, he managed to overcome the autocorrect's attempts to help him, and he got the right number.
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