by Jeff Abbott
Alex said, “You need to stay out of sight, keep the lights off, don’t attract attention here. You’ve been kidnapped, remember.”
“That Whit Mosley saw me. He knows I wasn’t kidnapped this morning.”
“If he’s a problem,” Alex said, “I’ll handle him.”
“You can’t go kill a judge…”
“Stoney. There’s probably a good marathon on cable. Try the Cartoon Network. Knock yourself out.”
After Alex left, Stoney made a phone call, poured a shot of Jack Daniel’s, downed it like medicine, lay on the froufrou pillows of the Mayweather couch, drowsily replaying in his mind killing Danny. It wasn’t so bad. He hadn’t liked Danny begging for his life; that bothered him, but what was done was done.
He decided he’d rather think about Danny than about Ben. They’d never been particularly close as brothers, especially since Stoney made his money. Not ones to sit and talk about life. He quit thinking about Ben, got comfortable, dozed.
The knock on the door woke him from his drowse, and for a second he thought, Well, there’s Ben, back from fishing. No. He was in the cottage. Waiting for a friend. Stoney stood, opened the door.
“Come on in,” he said.
Lucy Gilbert stepped inside, glanced around. “Are we alone?”
“Yeah,” Stoney said. And as soon as he said it she pulled a gun from her purse, a big old revolver that must’ve been her uncle’s, but cleaned and oiled, and she aimed it squarely at his chest.
“You bastard,” Lucy said. “You killed them.”
“What’s this?” He tried to keep an easy tone in his voice. He hadn’t expected sweet, ditzy Lucy to be armed.
“You killed Patch and Thuy.”
“No, I didn’t,” he said. Wow, three times today he’d had a gun aimed at him and he nearly laughed, except Lucy looked a little ragged, and the third time might not be the charm. She was far more likely to shoot him. “I didn’t kill anyone, Lucy. I called you because I wanted to be sure you were safe.”
“I’m supposed to thank you? No one was supposed to get hurt. You were just supposed to dig up the stuff. I sell you my land, you rebury it, end of story.”
“I didn’t kill them,” he said again, “but if you want the guy who did, I can give him to you. But just you. Not the police, though, that’d be a mess for both of us.”
“I hate you,” Lucy said and the barrel, trained right on his chest, steadied. “Do you know what you might cost me? What you’ve already taken from me?”
“If you feel so righteous, pick up the phone and call the police. I’ll just sit on the couch while you explain to them how you knew who killed your uncle and his girlfriend and didn’t lift a finger.” He went and sat, crossed his legs.
“Don’t think I won’t,” Lucy said.
“Phone’s right there.”
He waited; she waited. She lowered the gun, just a bit, down toward his crotch. “Tell me what happened.”
Stoney did, quietly, saying how Alex had freaked when Thuy and Patch surprised them as they were finishing the dig, killed them both.
“And who killed Jimmy Bird?”
“Far as I know, he’s a suicide.” Stoney watched her lower the gun, the barrel pointing at the floor. “I’m not asking any more questions about it. Neither should you.”
“This Alex,” she said, “does he know about me?”
“He knows you’re Patch’s niece. He doesn’t know we know each other.” He cleared his throat. “I’m really sorry about your uncle and his friend, Lucy. Truly I am. No one was supposed to get hurt. If it’s comforting, it was very, very quick. They might have been afraid for a moment but it was as painless as could be.”
“Painless? He beat Patch’s head in with a shovel.”
“I know. First blow killed the poor guy. Alex just wanted to be… sure.”
“That is not comforting to me in the least, Stoney,” she said. She sat across from him in the heavy armchair. Closed her eyes. “I can’t believe this has happened. This had a bad vibe from the beginning and I ignored it.” She opened her eyes. “You’ve damaged up my aura, Stoney.”
“You still have the emerald?”
“Yes.”
“Where is it?”
“Safe.”
“Alex wants it. He’s not going to give up. I told him one lie about where it was, but he didn’t buy it.”
She gave a little shudder. “Why did you get involved with this guy?”
“A truly legit contract archaeologist wouldn’t have agreed to do the dig. Alex did. And he’ll do the redig on your land, make all the records and processes look clean.” He paused. “You know your boyfriend came to see me.”
“Oh, God.”
“He knew I’d met Patch those couple of times.”
“Oh, God.”
“I said Patch was just an acquaintance. He believed me.”
“I want you to stay away from Whit,” she said.
He got up, sat on the armchair’s arm next to her, put his arm around her. She felt good. He liked Lucy, her pert little nose, blue eyes, little barely visible freckles on her cheeks. He’d thought about what it’d be like to bed her, if she ever got over that judge and gave him a real glance.
“It’s gonna be okay,” he said, patting her. “I sure don’t have a thing against him.”
She stiffened under his hand. “So now what?”
“Alex might be a problem. Not just for me. For you. Or for your boyfriend,” he said. He had to be careful, not panic her overmuch. She might crack and run to Whit or to the police, even if it cost her everything. He ran a thumb along her shoulder blade.
She shrugged his hand off.
“Sorry, just trying to be a help.” He leaned back. “I know you’re upset—you got every right.”
“I don’t want you to ever touch me, Stoney. You understand?”
“Sure, Lucy.”
“I love Whit.”
“I know you do. I’m sorry. I’m just trying to be a friend.”
“You let Alex kill my uncle and Thuy and you want to be my friend?”
“I couldn’t stop him,” he said and then he had an idea, not a bad one at all, to solve his problems. It might work. “Lucy. That gun. You really know how to use it?”
She narrowed her gaze. “Why?”
“Like I said, Alex might be a problem.”
“You said you need him for the fake dig.”
“Sure. But he’s gotten real unpredictable. Maybe if he doesn’t want to do the fake dig on your land, just wants to take off, well, he might decide to hurt me. Or you, if he finds out someone else has the Devil’s Eye. And he knows Whit talked to me. He might hurt Whit. I don’t know.”
She stared. “You want me to shoot Alex.”
“I want us to be careful, sweetheart. We get through this, we both get what we want. You get your money, you get out of your debts, you get Whit.”
“I don’t know I want to sell you my land anymore, Stoney. And I think I have Whit—”
“Until he finds out about what you’ve done. Then he’ll be gone, Lucy.”
“I want out. This isn’t what I signed on for, Stoney.”
“Can’t, Lucy. Train left the station.” He went back to the couch, smiled at her, thinking, And I will touch you when I please when all this is done. “I’m not suggesting you kill Alex, Lucy. Clearly not. Just want you to be careful. I mean, he thinks Whit’s a threat to him, he’s going to come after him. We’re kind of pretending that I’ve been kidnapped right now—”
“What?”
“Just calm down. I don’t want to go into the why. But the last person who saw me was your boyfriend. Alex considers him a threat.”
Lucy stared at the gun in her lap.
“You know how to use it?” he asked again.
“Patch showed me,” she said. “When I was a lot younger.”
“Alex is staying at a little motel on the outskirts of Port Leo. The Sandspot. You know it?”
“Yeah.�
��
“Room 133.”
She didn’t say anything, looked down at her fingers closed around the gun.
“Well, now you know where he’s at, sweetheart,” Stoney said. “The rest is up to you.”
26
THE LITTLE PROSTITUTE was sitting on the flying bridge of Don’t Ask, munching an apple, apparently enjoying the late-afternoon breeze and the shade.
“Where’s Gooch?” Whit called as he came aboard.
“He said he had to hunt down someone,” Helen Dupuy said.
Hunt down. Not a good sign. “Who?”
“I don’t know. He said he’d call in a bit. He said it was okay for me to be here.”
She had decided he was an enemy. He sat next to her, kicked his sandals off. “I’m sure it is. You’re his guest.”
She finished her apple, wiped her hands.
“Do you normally get on planes with men you barely know?”
“That’s a really stupid question,” she said. She seemed a little less intimidated by him out of the robe. “What do you think?”
“You’re either very trusting or you’re very naive or—”
“Or maybe I just want to help Gooch get the guy who hurt me.”
“Okay.”
“You think I’m not good enough to be his friend. I can tell he told you what I do. You changed the way you look at me.”
“Gooch has the widest range of friends of anyone I’ve ever known.”
“He’s nice. Really nice.”
“When he wants to be. Don’t get on his bad side.”
“I bet I seen more bad sides than you have.”
“So how long are you staying?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have to rush back.”
“You don’t have a pimp?”
“I have a manager. Gooch explained to him I had a civic duty to come help.”
“Oh, Lord.”
“I’m not a streetwalker,” she said. She drank from a glass of water. “I got a regular clientele. Blue-collar guys. Most of ’em aren’t even married. They just can’t afford to spend a ton of money buying drinks for stuck-up girls who won’t give ’em none.”
“More civic duty.”
“You want my help or should I just leave now?”
“I want your help, Helen.”
“We talked with Jason Salinger. He didn’t have a photo, but my description of Albert and his of Allen Eck are both pretty much dead-on, except for Albert having black hair and Allen having brown. Both of ’em got a little part-moon scar on the corner of their mouths.”
“How did you explain to Jason what you wanted to know?”
“Just told him I was your secretary and you needed some more questions answered.” And like she was his secretary, she handed him a file. “Here. Gooch and I got on his laptop and went into the back issues site for the Times-Picayune. We looked up all the crime stories from between June first and June fourth. And a couple of days each way past that. Gooch said you’d be interested in the top story.”
As he started reading she gave him a summary. “Some rich guy up off St. Charles named Danny Mouton. But he goes by the name Danny Laffite, claims to be descended from Jean Laffite—got a history of mental problems, it says. Someone killed his cousin, who was staying at his house. Single shot through the forehead, close range. They don’t say the caliber in the paper.”
Like Thuy Tran.
“Was this Danny Laffite a suspect?” Jason Salinger had mentioned Danny Laffite, too, the supposed forger kicked out of the Laffite League.
“Nope. Visiting relatives in South Carolina at the time. Place was vandalized pretty heavily, apparently a TV, a VCR missing. A burglar. But Danny Laffite seems to have dropped out of sight afterward.”
“No arrests made?” He scanned the rest of the article, and a brief follow-up that was more about the checkered career of Danny Laffite than about the poor cousin, whose name was Phillip Villars.
“No. We printed out all the stories about homicides—there’s always more in the summer in New Orleans—but Gooch said he thought only this one mattered.” She sipped her water. “Gooch says Alex—that’s what I’m calling him now—is a treasure hunter, y’all think, and might have a connection to this Danny Laffite guy.”
“Possibly a loose one. They have a mutual acquaintance named Stoney Vaughn.”
“So that call Alex got, that he’d offed the wrong guy? Maybe Danny Laffite was supposed to get killed, not his cousin.”
“Would you hand me the phone, please?” Whit said.
He dialed 411, asked for a New Orleans listing for Daniel Mouton on First Street. A message said the phone had been disconnected. He clicked off.
A hazy shape was starting to form. But with Jimmy Bird dead by his own hand, would David or anyone else give a crap?
“I’m going below and taking a nap,” Helen said. “I had a long night and a long day and I’m tired.”
“Helen, thank you.” He hesitated. “I want you to know I don’t have a thing in the world against you.”
Helen Dupuy stood. “I’m real aware I’m not good enough for Gooch. I know it. He doesn’t. Maybe you could let me have a couple of nice days before he sees it and gives me a plane ticket home.” Then she went belowdecks.
Whit went back to his car and his cell phone rang in his pocket. He answered. Within a minute, he was roaring out of the marina parking lot, speeding toward the Port Leo hospital.
“You look good,” Whit said, touching Claudia’s hair. Lotion covered her skin, bandages wrapped her hands, an IV dripped into her arm. Her lips were swollen like jelly candies, her face blasted red with sunburn.
“You’re the worst liar on the planet. I look like hell. I feel like I ran a marathon. On my knees.”
She had spent nearly eight hours in the Gulf, treading water, waving as she told him, “a ridiculous red pillow,” until a sailboat with a retired Michigan couple aboard spotted her and pulled her from the water. They’d hurried her into Port Aransas. Even before they reached Mustang Island, she was wrapped in heavy blankets and on the radio with the coast guard, telling them about the kidnapping, giving them details on Jupiter and Miss Catherine, and saying that Danny was headed to Stoney’s house at Copano Flats, off the bay.
“Danny Laffite,” Whit said.
“But his boat didn’t make it. Apparently it sank earlier in the day, a bit off the Flats. No sign of Danny. And no one is at Stoney’s house. They’ve sent people looking for him.”
“I saw him today.” Whit let go of her hand, sat on the edge of her bed. When he’d arrived she’d scooted her hovering parents out and asked a worried David to give them a moment’s privacy, which had been granted with a frown but not an argument. She’d been talking with the coast guard command, the sheriff’s office, and the FBI had been summoned in from the Corpus Christi satellite office.
“Why?” she asked.
He told her the complete story then, all of it, from the discovery of Patch’s and Thuy’s bodies, the links he kept finding between Stoney Vaughn and Patch, the connection to the Laffite League, Triple A, and Helen Dupuy, the murder a month ago at Danny Laffite’s house, the suicide of Jimmy Bird and the coins found in his pocket, his theory about a treasure dig.
She told him Danny’s story. Whit sat.
“It’s David’s case,” he said. “I wasn’t sure there was enough evidence about these connections… but based on what you’ve said—”
“We need to find Stoney Vaughn. Find Ben.” She closed her eyes. “Danny and his thugs were demanding ransom for us right after the kidnapping. At least, as of this morning, Stoney thought Danny had his brother. Which suggests to me that Stoney paid no ransom or the redhead—Danny says his name is Zack—never picked up the ransom.”
David stuck his head back into the room. “Pardon me, Whit, but we need to talk to her some more.”
“Actually,” Claudia said, “we all need to talk.”
An hour later, Claudia said good-bye to Whit, gave
a feeble wave.
David watched him go. “I mean, you and him, you can just take the case yourselves.”
“David, no one could know that it was a much more involved case than anyone—” she started, but he was mad, his skin flushed.
“You’re both gonna make me look like an utter fool. All this other stuff, it still doesn’t change the fact that Jimmy Bird killed himself, left a suicide note pretty much admitting he killed Gilbert and Tran. The FBI’s handling the kidnapping. They’ll take it from me quick, and if all this is mixed up together, the Feds’ll take that case from me, too. What the hell am I supposed to do, Claudia?” He stared at her, wobbled on his feet. “You could have been killed.”
“I’m okay. I’m okay, David.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed.
“Find Stoney. Find Ben. Stoney Vaughn seems to be the driving force of all this mess. Y’all find him—he’s the key to this whole case.”
He nodded. It was like they were still married, she thought. He knew what to do on a tough case but he had trouble delving to the heart of the matter, letting himself get distracted too easily. “Stoney Vaughn. Yes, you’re right.”
He went and poured them each a cup of ice water. He brought her hers; she wasn’t so thirsty now, with the IV hydrating her, but she took a sip on her sore lips.
“I need some more information from you if we’re to find your… boyfriend.” He said the last like he had a roach in his mouth.
“David,” she said gently, “this clearly upsets you. Why don’t you let me talk to another investigator?”
“It doesn’t upset me.”
She let it be.
He sat on the edge of the bed, had a notebook out but didn’t open it.
“What else did you want to know?”
“Um…”
“Because I’m exhausted, David. I’m really, really exhausted. I’d like to get some sleep.”
“Sure.” He stood. “Sure. I’ll be back soon. You rest.” And awkwardly, he leaned down and kissed her forehead, quickly, chastely.
She watched him step out of the room.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow she’d be out of the hospital. She’d check herself out, help in the search for Ben and Stoney. The FBI, she knew, would be poring over the Vaughn house, looking for Jupiter up and down the Texas coast.