by Jeff Abbott
He went down heavy, his head cracking against the pavement. She piled on top of him, one hand yanking his hair back and the other hunting his eyes. He screamed and elbowed her hard, shoved her down onto her back.
It was dark, a dim gleam of lights from the warehouse and the port blocks away, and she saw faint shine on a gun’s barrel—he’d had both guns; he must’ve dropped one when she kicked his feet out from him. The shine was a half foot from her hand and she seized the gun, prayed the safety was off, swung it toward his face and fired.
Missed.
He stumbled to his feet, turning and running for the warehouse. “Freeze! Ben!” He didn’t freeze and she fired twice in the dark. She heard the wet-meat sound of a bullet striking him, heard him sprawl along the steps leading to the warehouse.
She ran to where Ben lay. In the thin light from the shuttered windows she saw the wound in the lower part of his back, blood a black spurt. He breathed in sharp hitches, groaning.
Gunshots inside, and she’d just shot a man. Gooch in there, maybe in trouble. She ran back to her truck, fumbled for the cell phone.
Missed, Whit thought in that split second.
The blade missed and Alex would shoot him before he could stab again. But then Alex’s eyes went wide, shocked, his hand went to his throat and the blood fountained. Alex trying to scream and nothing coming but blood.
Alex’s eyes flashed with rage and fear and horror and he brought the gun back up toward Whit but then he dropped it, the other hand going to his throat to stem the flood. He fell to his knees. Whit grabbed the gun, stood there.
“How does it feel?” Whit said, his voice breaking. “How does it—”
And he saw Alex’s lips forming the word please.
The organic coppery smell of rupture filled the air, overpowered the scent of gunfire.
“Gooch?” Claudia’s voice called.
Whit saw her coming through the still-open front door, her service pistol out, in a firing stance. He tried to speak, as silent as Alex.
Claudia ran to him, seeing Alex bleed out his life, toppling to the floor, grabbing at Whit’s shoes. She gasped at the sight of Stoney’s body.
Whit didn’t let go of the saw; its handle felt burned to his hand.
Claudia tore Alex’s shirt off him, pushing the fabric around his throat, trying to stanch the flow of blood, apply useless pressure, telling him help was on the way.
Whit said, without looking at her, “Gooch is here. Help him.”
“Whit…” Claudia started.
Whit set Alex’s gun on a table. He dropped the saw on the floor.
“Let him die, Claudia. Just let him die.”
Alex paled, stared up at him, then through him.
“I’m going to find Gooch.” Whit’s voice didn’t sound quite right.
“Whit,” Claudia said. “Whit.”
40
CLAUDIA WENT WITH Whit to the Coastal Psychics Network on Sunday afternoon, not having slept that night. He had a spare key Lucy had given him two weeks ago and he opened the doors. The business was closed, the psychics mourning at home.
“I didn’t think straight. Didn’t think about where she’d hide it,” he said.
“We don’t have to do this now, Whit,” Claudia said.
“She loved this place. And I don’t want it here,” Whit said. “If I’m right. Her office is this way.”
Jean Laffite’s treasure was finally confirmed to consist of twenty thousand dollars’ worth of gold bars, ten thousand in silver bars, and a cache of rare 1820-minted Monteblanco coins worth, in numismatic and historical value, five million dollars. Scattered among the coins and bars in the crates used by Alex and Stoney were fragments of bone and soil from the Gilbert dig site, including a finger bone. The Corpus Christi police kept the treasure in the warehouse under heavy guard while they processed the shooting scene and called the Texas Historical Commission. But the Devil’s Eye was yet to be found.
In her office, Whit glanced at the small foil mobile, the scattered books on ESP and phone marketing, still with their little neon Post-its as bookmarks, worn from her thumbing. On the mantel above her desk were the crystals, amber and yellow and clear and green and red. Arranged just so for the healing powers they emitted. He didn’t feel healed.
“There,” he said.
“Oh, Whit,” Claudia said. “I don’t think so. These are too small.”
“No. Look,” he said. He inspected several, then ran his finger along the largest green one. It was the muddy green of a riverbed. He scraped paint off the stone with a thumbnail and the soft green glow came through, the color of time. The seductive green of envy.
“It’s really sort of ugly.” He handed it to her. “Iris Dominguez can tell us if this is it. Or a gemologist. Right now I don’t know where else to look. Hiding it here is classic Lucy. Plain sight. She—” He stopped.
“Whit…”
“I never want to see it again, okay, Claudia?”
“Okay,” she said. “Listen. I’m worried about you. We need to talk.”
He stared at her. “The way you shot your boyfriend. I meant to say that was well done, what with it being so dark.”
A day later four gemologists said the Devil’s Eye was worthless: the right size, but not the valuable emerald. A nicely done copy, not worth millions, not worth anything at all. At some time—either by a thief in Mexico before Santa Barbara sailed or by Jean Laffite or by Stoney—the Eye was replaced with a worthless hunk of green crystal.
Claudia stopped by his house and told Whit about the report. He was silent. She wondered if he had slept.
“Whit?” she said after the silence grew too long.
Finally he said, “People will keep looking for it, won’t they?”
“I suppose they will, after all the news coverage. Dig up Stoney Vaughn’s yard, or the rest of Black Jack Point. David’s mentioned they’ve already chased some folks off Stoney’s land. Thinking he hid some of the treasure there.”
He turned away from her.
“Whit?”
“I figured out the person who snooped through my house was Lucy. She knew where my key was, under the fern on the porch. I guess she wanted to know if I had notes on the murders, if there was any way she could be implicated. Or if Stoney was implicated. Whatever might lead back to her.”
“Maybe Lucy came here, waited for you to come home, wanted to tell you the whole truth. Then she lost her nerve, left.”
“It’s nice to think that,” he said, “isn’t it?”
When Claudia got home David was waiting there in shorts and a T-shirt. He sat on the stairs leading to her apartment with a cold twelve-pack of Shiner Bock.
“What’s this?” she said.
“I think we should get drunk,” David said. “I’m more likely to apologize when I’m drunk.”
“That’s a good reason.”
“Someone finally put you through more hell than I did,” David said. “That sucks. I’m sorry, Claudia.”
She let him in and they drank the beer, her sitting on the couch, him on the floor. She drank the first one fast, too fast, and made herself promise to take longer for the second.
“So Ben was in it with Alex Black from the beginning?”
“I wasn’t the only seduction in Ben’s life,” Claudia said.
David raised an eyebrow.
“Ben got seduced himself. Living with a wealthy brother who was living on the edge of the law in more ways than one and wasn’t paying a price for it. Of course Ben is not talking and he’s using Stoney’s money to hire some fancy defense lawyer from Houston.” She sipped her beer. “I won’t get a chance to say this on the stand at Ben’s trial unless we find evidence, but I think Ben found out about Stoney’s plan to steal treasure from Patch Gilbert’s land and fake an archaeological dig on Lucy’s land. And if he’d gotten to know Alex Black through Stoney, he would have seen that Alex was more interested in the treasure’s financial value than in the fame of discovery. Be
n didn’t have Stoney’s blind spot for glory. So he must have cut a separate deal with Alex. They would have grabbed the treasure and then Alex would have eliminated Stoney. But then they didn’t plan on Patch and Thuy Tran showing up and having a double murder complicate their whole deal. And they sure didn’t count on Danny Laffite coming after them with a gang and a vengeance.”
She finished her beer. David handed her another. “You know what pisses me off?” she asked.
“What, honey?”
“That jerk,” she said. “He abandoned me with Danny and Gar, maybe he even cut a deal with Zack Simard to get him to leave us behind on the other boat. He knew Gar would kill me, kill Danny. I’m sure he killed Zack Simard at some point, dumped the body, ran the boat aground. He looked like the poor little victim. The whole time he was in with Alex Black. I’m pretty sure Stoney never called Ben that night, asking him to come to the warehouse. That was Alex and Ben’s plan: get rid of Stoney, get rid of me since I was pushing on Ben to help the cops, leave the country with the treasure.”
“He should have stuck with teaching.”
“Ben molding young minds—I may puke.” She downed more beer, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I don’t think it would surprise me if he and Alex had planned on getting rid of each other, in the end. Greedy bastards.”
“Claudia, it’s not your fault.” David rested his chin on his knees, gave her a sad smile.
“What?”
“I know you. You’re mad at yourself for not having seen through this guy. Listen, his own brother didn’t see through him.”
“I’m smarter than Stoney Vaughn ever was, please.” She shook her head. “I think my career at the PD just flatlined. He’s ruined a couple of major league pleasant high school memories for me.”
“Memories?”
“He was my first, David, back when we were in high school.”
He opened another beer. “You mean I wasn’t?”
“I never told you you were. You were my second.”
“Well,” said David, “you weren’t my first either.”
“I think I’ll wear a red dress to Ben’s trial,” she said, a little drunk. “That loser.”
“I’m sorry,” David said. “For you. For Whit.”
“You can’t stand Whit.”
“I’m gonna try to stand him, Claud.”
She smiled for the first time. “Now you’re drunk.”
They drank too much, both of them, and they ended up kissing but she wasn’t drunk enough to sleep with him. She wouldn’t let him drive, so David slept on her couch and at one point in the night, dehydrated and hungover, she got up for water and she watched him sleep and to her surprise a little part of her missed him.
Then she went back to bed, hoping it was just the beer.
41
LUCY WAS BURIED next to Patch, in Port Leo’s big, grand Catholic cemetery. Afterward, Whit felt as hollow as though his bones had been plucked from beneath his skin. He took a month off from court, got a retired county judge to fill in for him. He did not have to rule on Lucy’s cause of death or see the autopsy papers. He let Gooch take him out on the waters each day after the funeral, the summer roaring into its hottest days, sat and stared at the flat of the bay, watching the waves live and die in their brief existence.
The third week Gooch invited Claudia and she sat with Whit on the stern of the boat, in chairs designed for deep-sea fishing. Gooch stood on the flying bridge, steering out into the Gulf. Helen Dupuy had gotten work in Port Leo, cleaning at a bed-and-breakfast, and could not join them. Whit drank a Coke, not talking much, only saying how the Astros were bound to disappoint again this summer.
“Lucy enjoyed baseball, didn’t she?” Claudia said.
Whit didn’t look at her. “Yeah.”
She touched his hand. “I didn’t love Ben—I hadn’t quite gotten past the infatuation point. We hadn’t been together very long. But you loved Lucy.”
“Yes, Dr. Claudia, I did.” Sounding a little irritated with her now.
“But you haven’t grieved for her.”
“Of course I have.”
“Tell me, did killing Alex make you feel better, Whit?”
He stared at her, turned away. “This is going to be a damn long day fishing.”
“It was self-defense. But you killed him. You even told me to let him die. Not that anything could have saved him then.” Her words—unsaid in the long quiet of the past weeks—came in a rush.
“Claudia, let it go.”
“Are you worried you’re like him in some way? He killed Lucy, you killed him—you think you’re on his level?”
“No,” he said after a pause. “I don’t feel anything about killing him yet. That bothers me.” He looked away. “But Lucy. I… yelled at her. I ended it with her. I said terrible things to her.”
“You had every right to be mad at her, at what she’d done. You can be mad at someone you love.”
“That only works if you get to say you’re sorry, Claud.”
“She knows, Whit. She knows.” She laced her fingers with his.
Gooch stopped the boat, dropped anchor, called down that it was time to fish.
“Let’s go swimming first,” she said.
“You want to get in the water? After you nearly died out here?”
“Not the water’s fault. What am I supposed to do, avoid the Gulf for the rest of my life?” Claudia stood, took off her T-shirt, dropped her shorts. She had a swimsuit underneath, a navy two-piece, not cut too brief.
“Is that a police-issue bikini?” Gooch called.
She shot him the finger, dove over the edge. She surfaced. “Come on, it feels great,” she called to Whit, who stood at the rail.
He didn’t move.
“Whit, come on.”
Whit shucked off his shirt, cannonballed over the railing like he thought he’d better before he changed his mind. Broke to the surface, let the gentle wave swell pick him up, settle him back down. Claudia kicked away from him, giving him space.
“It feels okay,” he said.
She watched him dive down, surface, again and again, swimming through the waves, and if there were any tears on his face she could not tell.
They swam, they fished, Gooch saying no more than two sentences about what a good job his Washington lawyer had done in keeping his record clean. They talked instead of baseball, of books, of perhaps a trip to Austin for a long weekend to hear Lyle Lovett play. The day was warm and sleepy, the water fine and greenish-blue, the sky smooth as pearl. On the way back in through the bay Whit watched Claudia doze in her chair and he wanted to reach out and touch her hand and say, I know how bad Ben hurt you. I know, and still you worry about me and I can’t believe how you care. But I’ll be okay. Given time, I’ll be okay. I will choose to be okay.
But Whit didn’t say any of these things. He just closed his eyes and let the sun warm him. Knowing that here, with these two people sacred to him on this boat, he had a wealth to outshine rare gold or the most precious gem. More than he could ever need.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeff Abbott is the New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of fourteen novels. His books include the Sam Capra thrillers Adrenaline, The Last Minute, and Downfall, as well as the standalone novels Panic, Fear, Collision, and Trust Me. The Last Minute won an International Thriller Writers award, and Jeff is also a three-time nominee for the Edgar award. He lives in Austin with his family. You can visit his website at www.jeffabbott.com.
NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The lore about Jean Laffite—and his buried treasures—is rich along the coasts of Texas and Louisiana. For this novel, I have drawn on sources both historical and legendary. Laffite, the great hero of the Battle of New Orleans and privateer, left New Orleans to continue his pirating operations on Galveston Island. Laffite was ordered out of Galveston in 1820 (also often cited as 1821) by the United States Navy. He burned Galveston to the ground, most of his pirates dispersed, and Laf
fite sailed off into the Gulf; after that point, history blurs the line between fact and romanticized fiction. Did he die of fever in the Yucatán? Or did he die in a sea battle or in a Cuban prison after committing more piracy in the Caribbean? Did he die in a battle off the coast of Cartagena, Colombia? Did he retire to South America and a generally peaceful old age? As of this writing, we do not know with absolute certainty.
I have drawn on legends local to Aransas and Matagorda bays in Texas: that Laffite buried a large treasure there after abandoning Galveston, since he was facing pressure from both the American and British navies and did not want to be captured with his remaining booty aboard his vessel. But my “end history” for Laffite is entirely of my own imagining, although Dr. John Fanning and Lynx were real. And since Port Leo, Black Jack Point, St. Leo Bay, and Encina County are fictional places, Laffite’s presence there is of course fictional. The supposed descendants of Jean Laffite and Catherine Villars—did she exist or not?—who are described herein are entirely fictional. There was no Monteblanco mint in Colonial Mexico.
In researching and writing this book, I am indebted to the following:
My wife and children, for their extraordinary support and patience.
Genny Ostertag and Peter Ginsberg, for insight and support in finding the heart of the book.
Mitch Hoffman, Emi Battaglia, Beth de Guzman, Siobhan Padgett, Lindsey Rose, Barbara Slavin, Andrew Duncan, Jane Lee, Sonya Cheuse, and the entire Grand Central team.
Joe Stanfield, for coastal hospitality and unfailing generosity.
Sue Hastings Taylor, author and preeminent historian of Aransas County, who shared lore about Laffite in the Texas Coastal Bend and took me to probable treasure dump sites in the maze of offshore islands and inlets.