Lethal Lover

by Laura Gordon

  “There it is,” she said. “Up ahead on the right.” The long, low wooden structure seemed to tilt precariously to one side and yet miraculously managed to support a sagging tin roof. Along with a dozen other restaurants and bars, The Dive was situated on a beach above a midsize harbor where bobbing strings of lights revealed a cluster of commercial fishing rigs and dive boats docked.

  In the distance Tess could see the twinkling lights of the modern high-rise office buildings in downtown Georgetown. She stared at the city’s skyline and wondered how many times Selena had traveled this strip of highway to indulge in the shady business practices that had now put her life at risk. Tess had to swallow the resentment she felt rising.

  Reed swung the Jeep into the sandy parking lot of a noticeably more upscale establishment a few hundred yards north of The Dive. They climbed out and walked around the building to the patio. A reggae band was in full Caribbean swing. The mellow music with its distinctive beat seemed again strangely irritating to Tess, whose jangled nerves begged for quiet.

  They found an empty table and sat down. Reed ordered a beer and Tess followed suit, passing on the rum punch she knew she could never drink again without thinking of the day Selena had disappeared. When the waiter brought their drinks, Tess picked up a menu. An enticing spicy smell had greeted them as soon as they’d walked in, convincing Tess that she might be able to find an appetite with the right combination of foods.

  “Take your time,” Reed said after the waiter had left them alone again. “We have almost an hour before we’re expected next door.”

  “We?”

  He lifted his beer and took a thirsty swig before answering. “You saw that place. Do you really expect me to let you go in there alone?”

  “But they’ll recognize you from last night. He said—” Tess began in a whisper, feeling any hint of an appetite evaporate as her heart beat accelerated.

  “I don’t give a damn what he said,” Reed interrupted in a burst of uncharacteristic emotion. “Besides, when I tackled you last night I was at a dead run. I doubt they got a long enough look at me to distinguish me from any other tourist wandering into the neighborhood bar to have a beer.”

  When she glared at him, he added, “Listen, I don’t intend to advertise the fact that we’re together, but you’ll know I’m there should something go wrong.” He drained his beer and stood up. “When the waiter comes back, order me another beer.”

  Tess opened her mouth to protest his leaving, but he stopped her. “Will you relax? I’m only going to the head. I’ll be back before my drink gets warm.”

  * * *

  THE DIVE was aptly named. Its atmosphere was dark and the lingering smell of stale cigarette smoke was almost enough to make Reed glad he’d quit. In one corner a group of locals played dominoes, while at another table a heated argument over a game of gin was turning ugly.

  At the back of the bar, a group of loud drunks played pool beneath a plastic beer lamp that had yellowed with age and grime and cast off an eerie green light. From a jukebox beside the front door Willie Nelson crooned “You Were Always On My Mind.” Idle curiosity caused Reed to wonder who among the assembled group had chosen the sentimental ballad.

  When he walked up to the bar, he could feel a dozen eyes on his back and was glad he’d changed clothes before leaving the hotel and that the loose shirt he’d put on over his T-shirt now hid the gun shoved in his waistband.

  Reed held up the bottle he’d brought in with him and indicated to the mahogany-skinned giant behind the bar to bring him another.

  “Are you the owner of this place?” Reed asked the huge man whose full beard and shoulder-length hair was a dirty yellow-white.

  “Yeah, mon,” the bartender responded as he set Reed’s beer down in front of him. “My name’s Davey. Get it, mon? Davey’s Dive?” The big man pitched his head back and broke into a hacking horselaugh. “Hey, you wouldn’t be interested in buying Davey’s Dive, would you, mon?” He eyed Reed hopefully. “She’s always for sale, you know?” he explained, wiping his hands on the corner of the grimy apron stretched across his ample girth. “To the right man with the right money everything’s for sale, you know what I mean, mon?”

  When Reed didn’t answer, Davey lowered his voice to a conspiratorial level. “But maybe you’re looking to buy something else tonight, like maybe the company of a pretty lady?” This time his laugh was low and dirty.

  Reed shrugged and took a long, slow swig of his beer, while keeping one careful eye on the big man behind the bar. Experience had taught him that not all clowns were benign.

  “I’ve been told that if I need to get a message to someone, this is the place to leave it. Is that true, Davey?”

  The facade of friendliness slipped. “Message?” Davey asked, leaning back against the row of bottles behind him and crossing his hamlike forearms over his stomach. “No, mon. We don’t deliver no messages here.” He shook his big hairy head and his eyes narrowed. “Maybe somebody’s playing a joke on you or you got some bad advice. Or maybe you’re just confused. You want a message delivered, you got to go down to the post office.”

  Reluctantly, Reed pulled a fifty-dollar bill out of his shirt pocket and slid it across the bar.

  With a look of undisguised greed, Davey eyed the bill.

  “Take it,” Reed instructed and when the bartender bent to pick up the money, Reed’s hand snaked out and grabbed a handful of dirty beard and jerked the big man’s face down level with his. “I’m here to pick up a message, mon,” Reed mimicked in a menacing voice only he and the bartender could hear. “A message left for an American woman. Tess Elliot. And you’re going to give me that message regardless of what you’ve been paid to do.”

  The man’s eyes bulged and he opened his mouth, only to have Reed interrupt. “And after you give me that message, you’re going to tell me everything about the scum who delivered it. Everything,” he repeated in a voice dangerously low. “You’ll remember him like he was your own father. You got that, mon? You got my message?”

  The hulking bartender tried to nod, but Reed’s grasp on his beard was unrelenting.

  “Good. I knew I’d come to the right place.” Reed sighed as he released the startled giant who stumbled backward rubbing his chin, his black eyes watering. “Now, talk. I haven’t got all night.”

  When the bartender had finished talking, Reed knew little more than he had when he’d walked into The Dive. The young, black man Davey described as having left the cryptic message for Tess could have been any one of the dozen locals in that very room.

  “You’re sure all he said was to tell her to wait at the table near the jukebox and nothing more?”

  “He said he’d be late—ten minutes or so. He said I should make sure she waited.”

  Reed put a twenty-dollar bill on top of the fifty.

  “Let me get this straight,” Reed began, “after this guy gives you the message he just walks out, right?”

  Davey’s eyes darted to the money and he shook his head. “No way. He finished his beer and played five or six songs on the jukebox. He really liked music, that mon. He hung over that thing, dropping in coins like he didn’t ever want to leave. Then, like he forgot he had to be someplace else, he pays his bill and runs out.”

  “And he didn’t talk to anyone, call anyone or meet anyone before he left?”

  “No. But I wasn’t watching him that close, you know, mon? I was busy. The fishing boats were docking and my regular customers were coming in.”

  Reed didn’t take his eyes off the man, but he toyed with the bills on the bar in front of him, as if he might pick them up again. “I’d hoped you could be more helpful, Davey,” Reed said.

  Davey rubbed his heavy beard and tilted his head thoughtfully. “You know, there was one thing about him that I remember now that I think about it.”

  “Oh, yeah? What’s that, Davey?” Reed asked, setting his beer down on top of the money.

  “That mon, that messenger, he had the weirdest e
yes. Gray—no, more silver, like a picture of an Eskimo’s dog I saw once in a magazine. I ain’t never seen no eyes like that on a black man before. But after this guy leaves, one of my customers—Elmo—he says he’s seen the guy with the silver eyes down in Bodden Town. You know about that place, mon?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Reed replied.

  Davey sighed. “Lots of pretty women over in Bodden, you know, mon? They wear those little string bikinis and that’s only when it’s too cold to go naked.” The hacking laugh started again, but Reed’s scathing glance cut it off in midsnort.

  “Has this dump got a back door?” Reed asked as he stuffed the two bills into Davey’s shirt pocket.

  The big man nodded. “Yeah, sure. Back that way,” he said, pointing past a stack of boxes and garbage bags at the end of the bar.

  “There’s a number on the back of the fifty,” Reed said. “If old silver-eyes comes back, you’ll give me a call. Right, Davey?”

  “Sure, mon.” He patted his pocket and smiled. “But if I was you, I’d take a look around Bodden Town. Elmo, he knows everyone. If he says old silver-eyes comes from Bodden, then I believe him.”

  Reed downed the rest of his beer and headed for the door when a sudden movement to his left put all his senses on alert. Thanks to his old man, he’d developed a sixth sense for an ambush, and that gift came in handy now as he ducked the fist he saw coming at him while delivering a splitting right to the jaw and a punishing left to the midsection of his tattooed assailant.

  He watched the tall, muscle-bound attacker reel backward, crash between two tables and flatten a wooden chair as he fell. The younger version of the bartender lay groaning on the dirty wooden floor.

  Davey came lumbering around the end of the bar and doused the man on the floor with a pitcher of beer. The sound of chairs being scuffed back signaled to Reed that a couple of the gin players were headed his way.

  “Hold on, boys!” Davey bellowed, his voice resounding like a foghorn around the room and stopping the men cold. “We got your message, mon,” he assured Reed, coming up to stand beside him to stare down at the man who was struggling to sit up, huffing and panting like a wounded bull.

  “I think you’d better be going now,” Davey suggested. “This fool is my nephew—doesn’t know when to quit, but I can’t afford to lose no paying customers, you know, mon?” The horselaugh began again, this time backed up by a chorus of nervous laughter from the regulars who had gathered round to watch the show.

  “You’re all right, Davey,” Reed said at the door. “I’ll be waiting for your call.”

  When he stepped outside, Reed felt dirty and contaminated. Although his line of work often put him in similar settings, The Dive and places like it always made him feel like he needed a shower. He walked a few feet before he stopped to glance up at the night sky and take in a lungful of fresh air. It was a perfect island evening, warm and still, conditions that would be in his favor, since he didn’t intend to let Tess out of his sight.

  The thought of her dealing with the likes of Davey and his cohorts made his skin crawl, and no matter how much hell she raised, Reed wasn’t about to let her walk in there blind, no more than he’d been willing to let her walk into that warehouse—or shooting gallery as it had turned out to be.

  If he hadn’t been thinking about her, he might not have jumped when he heard her scream. At first he thought it was only his imagination playing tricks on him, but his rage was all real when he burst back into the bar to see Tess shoved up against the jukebox with Davey’s nephew towering over her, his big, thick fingers digging into the pale flesh of her upper arm.

  “You tell that boyfriend of yours I’m waiting for him,” the big man shouted in her face. “Anytime, anyplace!”

  “How about now?” Reed hissed, as he slid up behind the man and pressed the barrel of his .38 against his neck.

  The bar was stunned quiet and nothing moved but the overhead fan as it stirred the smoke-gray air. Davey’s nephew, his lip still bloody from his encounter with Reed, stood stone still.

  Reed shoved the gun barrel harder against his neck and the big man raised his hands slowly, as if under arrest, but suddenly he spun around with a speed and agility surprising for his size.

  Before Reed could pull the trigger, Tess reacted, and when her knee made contact, the big man folded like an accordion made of cardboard, dropping to the floor clutching himself, cursing and bellowing in pain.

  “Damn friendly place you’ve got here, Davey,” Reed muttered over his shoulder as he backed Tess with him out the door. If he went the rest of his life without dealing with the kind of dirt inside Davey’s Cayman Island Dive, Reed could die a happy man, he told himself as he emerged into the night air again, with his gun in one hand and Tess’s trembling hand in the other.

  By the time they reached the parking lot behind the restaurant where they’d left the Jeep, Tess had stopped shaking, but her blue eyes were still wide and staring and her face was devoid of color.

  Despite all she’d just endured, he came down on her with both barrels. “How the hell could you have done such a damn-fool thing?” he demanded, pinning her with his stare as he stood with his back to the Jeep, his arms crossed over his chest. “Didn’t I tell you to stay put?”

  The color returned to her face in a rush of red. “You told me you were just going to the men’s room,” she shouted.

  “It doesn’t matter what I told you,” he shot back. “You never listen anyway.”

  “Oh, so that’s the real problem, isn’t it? You’re just ticked off because I disobeyed your order!”

  “God, you always were the most—” He clenched his jaw to keep from saying it, from saying that she was the most maddeningly beautiful, independent and stubborn woman he’d ever known.

  “Go ahead, Reed.” Her glare was simmering, undaunted by the challenge of going toe-to-toe with him. “Say it! You hate that I have a mind of my own, that I insist on using my brain instead of blindly following your lead.”

  “I told you I’d be back.”

  “And I suppose you think that should have been good enough?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Well, excuse me, McKenna, but I had my doubts. You’ve run out on me before, remember?” She turned around and headed for the beach. “And by the way,” she added without looking at him, “I thought we had a deal about Selena’s journal.” She spun around to face him, her eyes no longer simmering but shooting fire. “Or was that just another one of your lies?”

  Before he could respond, she took off again, her long legs sprinting, seemingly without direction.

  When he caught up to her, he grabbed her by the hand and spun her around to face him. “What about the journal? Where is it?”

  “You know damn well where it is.”

  His gut did a slow twist as the implications of what she was saying hit him. “Tess,” he said trying to remain calm. “If you’re telling me you don’t have Selena’s journal, we’re in big trouble.”

  Her mouth fell open. “But—but I thought—”

  “You thought what?” The dread growing inside him became a palpable presence.

  “When you didn’t come back, I got up to leave the restaurant and found that my purse was gone.”

  “Are you sure you had it with you when we went in?”

  “Positive. I remember sliding the strap over the back of my chair.” Her eyes met his as the awful realization dawned. “Oh, my God! You mean you didn’t take it? I just assumed you wanted a closer look...I thought you...Oh, God...” Her voice trailed off in horror.

  Reed wanted to yell at her, to berate her for doubting him, to scald her for losing their only real link with Selena, for risking their only real leverage with the kidnappers. But the look on her face told him that nothing he could say could possibly make her feel any worse, any more guilty than she already did.

  “Don’t panic, Tess,” he said, even as his own mind scrambled for perspective. “Maybe it isn’t as bad as it
seems.”

  “Not as bad?” she gasped. “You know as well as I do that Selena’s notebook was the only thing keeping her alive. The only thing they wanted.”

  “Listen, no one but you and I know the notebook is missing.”

  She brought her hands up to her temples. “Then you don’t think—”

  “That it was Selena’s kidnappers who stole it?” He shook his head. “I really doubt it. More than likely it was just some con working the restaurants and bars frequented by tourists. Have you looked at some of the shacks around here? An expensive leather bag like yours signals money to petty thieves.”

  She blew out a ragged breath. “Well, someone is going to be disappointed if money was what they were looking for. Other than some traveler’s checks and my passport, that notebook was the only thing of real value.”

  “Obtaining another passport won’t be a problem.”

  In her eyes he could see she was more than ready to be reassured.

  “And other than Selena, the kidnappers and you and I, no one else could possibly know the significance of that journal. To anyone else the numbers inside are meaningless hieroglyphics.”

  Reed offered her a smile, despite his own misgivings. “Come on, let’s take a walk. We’ve got fifteen minutes before we have to go back inside that rat hole, and we need to talk about how we’re going to handle your meeting with the so-called messenger, how you’re going to explain the missing journal if he asks for it.”

  They walked along the beach in silence before she stopped suddenly and turned to him. “Reed, with Selena’s journal missing you have no choice but to take her back to testify, do you?” It wasn’t really a question, but a statement of a fact they both knew full well.

  “Yeah. It looks that way, doesn’t it?”

  Tess sighed. “I’m sorry now that I didn’t let you at least copy the information inside. What will happen to the Morrell case without it?”

  The Morrell case. He almost had to say it out loud to make it seem real again. Somehow in the last hour he’d forgotten all about Edward Morrell, the upcoming trial, even the money this case would bring him. His entire focus had been on protecting Tess, keeping her out of harm’s way.