Hostage At Crystal Manor

by Heather Graham

  “Shots were fired at us,” a voice said. “Who is this?”

  “I told you. Barrow.”

  “Are you the head man?”

  Nick glanced over at Dillinger.

  “No. I’m spokesman for the head man. He’s all into negotiation. What we want doesn’t have anything to do with a bunch of dead men and women, but that’s what we could wind up with if we don’t get this going right,” Nick said.

  “We don’t want dead people,” the voice on the other end assured him.

  “We don’t, either,” Nick said.

  “Barrow. All right, let’s talk. I think everyone got a little panicky. No one wants anyone to die here today. We’re all working in the same direction, that being to see that everyone gets out alive. Okay?”

  Nick knew who was doing the negotiating for the array of cops and FBI and law enforcement just on the other side of the gates.

  He was speaking with Craig Frasier. Nick was glad the FBI and the local authorities had gotten it together to make the situation go smoothly. He knew Craig; Craig knew him. There was so much more he was going to be able to do with Craig at the other end.

  “How are they doing on my boats?” Dillinger asked, staring at Nick.

  “We’re going to need those boats,” Nick said. He needed to give Craig all the information he could about the situation, without making Dillinger suspicious, and he wanted, also, to maintain his position as spokesman for Dillinger.

  “Yes, two boats, right?” Craig asked.

  “Good ones. The best speedboats you can get your hands on. Now, we’re not fools. You won’t get all the information you need to save everyone until we’re long gone and safe. But, right now, we’re going to give you a man. Security guard. He’s got a bit of a gash on his head. We’re going to bring him out to the front and we’ll see that the gate is opened long enough for one of you to get him out. Do you understand? The fate of everyone here may depend on this nice gesture on our part going well.”

  He knew that Craig understood; Nick had really just told him the guard had been the only one injured and that he did need help.

  “No one else is hurt? Everyone is fine?”

  Craig had to ask to keep their cover. But Nick knew the agent was also concerned for Dakota Cameron. That the Cameron family owned this place—and that Kody was down here—was something Craig must have realized from the moment Dillinger made his move.

  “No one is hurt. I’m trying to keep it that way,” Nick assured him, glancing over at Dillinger.

  Dillinger nodded. He seemed to approve of how Nick handled the negotiations. There was enough of a low-lying threat in Nick’s tone to make it all sound very menacing, no matter what the words.

  “That’s good. Open the gate and we’ll get the man. There will be no attempts to break in on you, no more bullets fired,” Craig said.

  Nick looked at Dillinger. Yes? he mouthed.

  Dillinger nodded. “Keep an eye on her!”

  As he hurried out, Kody stood and started after him, then paused herself, as if certain Nick would have stopped her if she hadn’t. He held the phone and stared at her, wishing he dared tell her who he was and what his part was in all this.

  But he couldn’t.

  He couldn’t risk her betraying him.

  He covered the mouthpiece on the house phone. “Don’t leave the room.”

  “Jose Marquez…” she murmured.

  “He’s really letting him go,” Nick said.

  She walked over to him suddenly. He was afraid she was going to reach for the mask that covered his face.

  She didn’t touch him. Instead she spoke quickly. “You’re not like that. You could stop this. You have a gun. You could—”

  “Shoot them all down?” he asked her.

  “Wound them, stop this—stop them from killing innocent people. I’d speak for you. I’d see that everyone in court knew that people survived because of you.”

  She was moving closer as she spoke—not to touch him, he realized, but to take his gun.

  He set the phone down and grabbed her roughly by the wrists.

  “Don’t pull this on anyone else. Haven’t you really grasped this yet? They’re trigger happy and crazy. Just do as they say. Just find that damned stash!”

  Something in her jaw seemed to be working. She looked away from him.

  “You found it already?” he said incredulously. “You have, haven’t you? But that’s impossible so fast!”

  She didn’t confirm or deny; she gave no answer. He heard a crackle on the phone line and put it back to his ear. As he did so, he looked out the windows.

  Dillinger, wielding a semiautomatic, was leading out two hostages carrying Jose Marquez. They brought him close to the gate, Dillinger keeping his weapon trained on them the entire time.

  They left Jose and walked back into the house.

  Dillinger followed them.

  A second later the gate opened. Police rushed in and scooped up the security guard. They hurried out with him.

  The gates closed and locked.

  “Barrow! Barrow? Hey, you there?”

  “Yes,” Nick replied into the phone.

  “We have the security guard. We’ll get him to the hospital. What about the others? Do they need food, water?”

  Kody was staring at him. He heard footsteps pounding up the stairs, as well.

  Dillinger was back.

  “Sit!” he told Kody. “Figure out what we need to do in order to get our hands on that stash.”

  To his surprise, she sat. She sat—and had the journal up in her hands before Dillinger returned to the room.

  “Well?” Dillinger said to Nick.

  Nick spoke into the phone. “We’ve given you the hostage in good faith. We really would like to see that all these good folks live, but, hey, they call bad guys bad guys because…they’re bad. So back away from the gates and start making things happen. What about our boats?”

  “I swear, we’re getting you the best boats,” Craig said.

  “I want them now,” Dillinger said.

  “We need you to supply those boats now,” Nick said, nodding to Dillinger and repeating his demand over the phone. “We need them out back, by the docks, and then we need you and your people to be far, far away.”

  “The boats will be there soon,” Craig told Nick.

  “Soon? Make that six or seven minutes at most!” he said.

  He hoped Craig picked up on the clue. Stressing the word told him there were seven in this merry band of thieves.

  “Don’t push it too far!” Nick added. “Maybe we’ll give you to ten or eleven minutes to get it together, but…well, you don’t want hostages to start dying, do you?”

  Easy enough. That told him there were eleven hostages, including Dakota Cameron, being held.

  Dillinger looked at Nick and nodded, satisfied.

  “We’ve got one of the boats,” Craig said. “How do I get my man to bring it around and not get killed or become a hostage himself?” he asked.

  “One boat?”

  “So far. Getting our hands on what you want isn’t easy,” Craig said. “If we give you that one boat, what do we get?”

  “You just got a man.”

  “We could find a second boat more quickly if we had a second man—or woman,” Craig said.

  They had to be careful; the negotiator’s voice carried on the land line.

  Of course, Craig Frasier knew that. He would be careful, but Nick knew that he had to be more so. Dakota could hear Craig, as well.

  “Please,” she said softly, “give them Stacey Carlson and Nan Masters. They’re older. They’ll just be like bricks around your neck when you need hostages for cover. Please, let them leave.”

  “P
lease,” Dillinger said, mimicking her plea, “find what I want to know!”

  “I might have,” Kody said very softly.

  “You might have?”

  “Give the cops two more hostages. Give them Stacey and Nan,” she said. “I’ll show you what I think I’ve figured out once you’ve done that. Please.”

  Dillinger looked at Nick. “Hey, the lady said please. Let’s accommodate her. Get on the phone and tell them to get the hell away from the gate. We’ll give them two more solid, stand-up citizens.” His eyes narrowed. “But I want my boats. Two boats. And I want them now. No ten minutes. No eleven minutes. I want them now!”

  He looked at Kody. She was staring gravely at him.

  “We have a present for you,” he told Craig over the phone. “Two more hostages. Only we want two boats. Now. We want them right now.”

  “And if we don’t get those boats soon…” Dillinger murmured.

  He looked over at Kody.

  And his eyes seemed to smile.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “It’s done. He’s let them go. Three of the hostages. Your security man, Marquez, and the manager and his assistant.”

  Kody looked up from the journal she’d been reading.

  Concentration had not been an easy feat; men were walking around with guns threatening to kill people. That made her task all the more impossible.

  But it was Barrow who had walked in to speak with her. And the news was good. Three of her coworkers were safe.

  And she was sure it was Craig Frasier out there doing the negotiating with them on the phone. Craig Frasier. From New York. In Miami.

  But then, at Finnegan’s, Kieran had been saying that Craig was going on the road; they’d been tracking a career criminal who’d recently gotten out of prison and was already starting up in NYC, and undercover agents in the city had warned that he was moving south.

  Dillinger?

  Was Craig Frasier here in Miami after Dillinger?

  The masked man with the intense blue eyes was staring at her. She schooled her expression, not wanting to give away any of her thoughts or let on that she knew the negotiator and might know about their leader.

  “So what happens now?” she asked. Capone was once again standing just outside the library, near the arched doorway to the room. He was, however, out of earshot, she thought, as long as they spoke softly.

  “We need getaway boats. And, of course, Anthony Green’s bank haul stash. How are you doing?” Barrow asked her.

  How the hell was she doing?

  Maybe—maybe—with days or weeks to work and every bit of reference from every conceivable source, she might have an answer. So far she had found some interesting information about the old gangster, Miami in the mob heyday, and even geography. She’d gone through specs and architectural plans on the house. But she was pretty sure she’d been right from the beginning—the stash was not at the house on Crystal Island. It was in the Everglades—somewhere.

  To say that to find something in the Everglades was worse than finding a needle in a haystack was just about the understatement of the year. The Everglades was actually a river—“a river of grass,” as one called it. On its own, it was ever-changing. Man, dams, the surge of sugar and beef plantations from the middle of the state on down, kept the rise and flow eternally moving, right along with nature. There were hammocks or islands of high land here and there. The Everglades also offered quicksand, dangerous native snakes and now, sixty-thousand-plus pythons and boas that had been let loose in the marsh and swamps, not to mention both alligators and, down in the brackish water, crocodiles, as well.

  Great place to hide something!

  “Well?” Barrow asked quietly.

  “I don’t think the stash is here,” she said honestly. “Anthony Green talks about having a shack out in the Everglades. My dad and his University of Miami buddies used to have one. They went hunting—they had their licenses and their permits to take two alligators each. But usually they just went to their shack, talked about school and sports and women—and then shot up beer cans. The shacks were outlawed twenty or thirty years ago. But that didn’t mean the shacks all went down, or that some of the old-timers who run airboat rides or tours off of the Tamiami Trail don’t remember where a lot of them are.”

  “So, the stash is in one of the old cabins,” Barrow murmured. “But you don’t know which—or where.” He hesitated. “A place like Lost City?”

  Kody stared at the man, surprised. Most of the people she knew who had grown up in the area hadn’t even heard about Lost City.

  Lost City was an area of about three acres, perhaps eight miles or so south of Alligator Alley, now part of I-75, a stretch of highway that crossed the state from northwestern Broward County over to the Naples/Ft. Myers area on the west coast of the state. It was suspected that Confederate soldiers had hidden out there after the Civil War, and many historians speculated that either Miccosukee or Seminole Indians had come upon them and massacred them all. Scholars believed it had been a major Seminole village at some point—and that it had been in use for hundreds of years.

  But, most important, perhaps, was the fact that Al Capone—the real prohibition era gangster—had used the area to create his bootleg liquor.

  She hesitated, not sure how much information to share—and how much to hold close.

  Then again, she didn’t have a single thing that was solid.

  But…

  It was evident he knew the area. Possibly, he’d grown up in South Florida, too. With the millions of people living in Miami-Dade and Broward counties alone, it was easy to believe they’d never met.

  And yet, they had.

  She knew his eyes.

  And she had to believe that, slimy thief that he was, he was not a killer.

  Yes, she had to believe it. Because she was depending on him, leaning on him, believing that he was the one who might save them—at the least, save their lives! She had to believe it because…

  It wasn’t right.

  But, when she looked at him. When he spoke, when he made a move to protect one of them…

  There was just something about him. And it made her burn inside and wish that…

  Wish that he was the good guy.

  “Something like that,” she said, “except there’s another version of the Al Capone distillery farther south. Supposedly, Anthony Green had a spot in the Everglades where he, too, distilled liquor. Near it, he had one of the old shacks. The place is up on an old hammock and, like the Capone site, it was once a Native American village, in this case, Miccosukee.”

  “You know where this place is?” Barrow asked her.

  “Well, theoretically,” she said with a shrug. “Almost all the Everglades is part of the national parks system, or belonging to either the Miccosukee or the Seminole tribes. But from what I understand, Anthony Green had his personal distillery on a hammock in the Shark Valley Slough—which empties out when you get to the Ten Thousand Islands, which are actually in Monroe County. But I don’t think that it’s far from the observation tower at Shark Valley. There’s a hammock—”

  Kody stopped speaking when she noticed him staring down at one of the glass-framed historic notes she had set next to the Anthony Green journal she’d been cross-referencing.

  “Chakaika,” he said quietly.

  She started, staring at him when he looked up and seemed to be smiling at her.

  “A very different leader,” he said. “Known as the ‘Biggest Indian.’ He was most likely of Spanish heritage, with mixed blood from the Creek perhaps, or another tribe that had members flee down to South Florida. Anyway, he was active from the center of the state on down—had his own mix of Spanish and Native American tongues and traded with other Native Americans, but seemed to have a hatred for the whites who wanted to ship the
Indians to the west. He attacked the fort and he headed down to Pigeon Key, where he murdered Dr. Henry Perrine—who really was, by all historic record, a cool guy who just wanted to use his plants to find cures for diseases.

  “Anyway, in revenge, Colonel Harney disguised himself and his men as Native Americans and brought canoes down after Chakaika, who thought they could not find him in the swamp. But they found a runaway slave of the leader’s who led them right to the hammock where the man lived. They didn’t let him surrender—they shot him and his braves, and then they hanged him. And the hammock became known as Hanging People Kay. I know certain park rangers believe they know exactly where it is.”

  Kody lowered her head, keeping silent for a minute. Her parents had been slightly crazy environmentalists. She knew all kinds of trivia about the state and its history. But while most people who had grown up down here might know the capital and the year the territory had become a state or the state bird or motto, few of them knew about Chakaika. Tourists sometimes stopped at the museum heading south on Pidgeon Key where Dr. Henry Perrine had once lived and worked, but nothing beyond that.

  “Chakaika,” he said again. “It’s written clearly on the corner of that letter.”

  “Yes, well…they found oil barrels sunk in the area once,” she murmured. “They were filled with two of Anthony Green’s henchmen who apparently fell into ill favor with their boss. I know that the rangers out there are pretty certain they know the old Green stomping grounds—just like they know all about Chakaika. The thing is, of course, it’s a river of grass. An entire ecosystem starting up at Lake Kissimmee and heading around Lake Okeechobee and down. Storms have come and gone, new drainage systems have gone in… I just don’t know.”

  “It’s enough to give him,” Barrow said. “Enough to make him move.”

  Kody leaned forward suddenly. “You don’t want to kill people. You hate the man. So why don’t you shoot him in the kneecap or something?”

  “And then Capone would shoot us all,” Barrow said. “Do you really think that I could just gun them all down?”