The Southern Comfort Series Box Set

by Clark O'Neill, Lisa

  Appropriately shod and doing her best to control her emotions, she grabbed her purse from the hall table. Then waited pensively for the sound of his footsteps, difficult to hear over the shrieking alarm. Finally, he emerged at the bottom of the stairs and came toward her with a wry expression. “This thing must really mean something to you.” He handed it over for her to deal with so that he had his hands available to reach his weapon.

  “You have no idea.” She took it from him with loving care and held it close as he shepherded her toward the stairwell.

  They encountered other residents on their descent, the whole lot of them swarming downward like lemmings. As they cleared the second floor landing, Sam caught the unmistakable scent of fire. Smoke roiled, spewing like phantom vomit from the mouth of the fire door below them as two turned-out firefighters poured forth. Sam coughed, the acrid smell stinging her nostrils, burning a path down her already abused throat. When the men saw Simms, clearly an officer in uniform, they paused to ask his help in controlling the outside crowd. As with any fire, this one had attracted a gaggle of onlookers whose curiosity sometimes overrode their common sense.

  “You got it,” Simms agreed from behind the arm he held against his face to prevent as much smoke inhalation as he could manage. Then he hustled Sam down the stairs as quickly as safety allowed, following their fellow escapees into the balm of the cool evening.

  Sam looked around at the chaos, refugees from the partially engulfed building standing around in varying degrees of both dress and shock. The curious, pulled from the many restaurants and businesses surrounding the residential structure, stood in casual little knots of morbid interest.

  The flickering glow from the flames illuminated some faces while casting others into shadow, the play of light eerie in the gathering twilight. Sam looked them over with an odd sense of detachment. Probably a lingering effect of the drugs. She thanked God for Simms – if she’d been on her own in the apartment there was no guarantee she would have awakened enough to make it out.

  Sam turned to survey the disaster. The lower level of the structure was obviously sustaining the greatest amount of damage. Josh’s condo was located in the far left-hand corner of the top floor, currently out of the reach of the flames which the firefighters were battling desperately to contain. Maybe, if they were really lucky, it would be spared from total ruin.

  She clutched Josh’s artwork to her chest and even the heat from the flames couldn’t penetrate her numbness. All that was happening just didn’t seem real.

  “I should call Josh,” Simms pointed out.

  “Okay,” she agreed, tonelessly. Poor Josh didn’t need any more stress. But before Simms could pull out his phone, a scuffle erupted in the crowd. An onlooker had started filming with his cell phone, no doubt hoping to sell his footage to an arriving news crew or upload it to Youtube, and one of the residents had taken umbrage. He knocked the phone out of the other man’s hand, causing the first guy to start shoving. Within moments others had stepped into the fray and things were looking to get out of hand.

  “Ah, hell,” Simms muttered. “Stay right here while I go deal with this.”

  Looking pissed off and disgusted, Simms waded into the mess. Sam took the opportunity to set the drawing against a nearby lamppost. Framed behind glass as it was, it was relatively heavy. She was still too sore to be able to carry it for any length. Wearily, she sat down beside it, coughing some lingering smoke from her throat.

  “Ma’am?”

  Sam looked up into the benign face of a fireman who’d stepped from the gathering shadows. “You look like you could use a hit of this.” He gestured to the oxygen tank he carried.

  “I’m fine,” she said, but her voice betrayed her, emerging as more croak than words.

  He smiled and knelt down beside her. “Just a couple deep breaths and you’ll feel better.”

  “Alright,” she relented, coughing. She took the apparatus and placed it over her face. She breathed in and out, looking over the molded plastic to the man hovering above her. All of his features seemed to blur together. Maybe the drugs, she thought, woozy. Maybe she’d inhaled more smoke than she thought.

  And yet even as she sucked oxygen into her lungs, the fireman’s face faded into black.

  TONY Salinas, Josh thought, using the flat of his pencil to define the cheekbones. The composite had been trickier than usual to pull off because of the changes wrought by the fire. But after laboring over his sketchpad for hours he felt certain they had the right man.

  One piece of the puzzle down.

  Salinas had indeed died in that fire. But how or if he connected to the man who’d attacked Sam still needed to be fit into place. He had a feeling there was a bigger picture they were missing, that the two dead men were only part of the whole. But since his objectivity couldn’t be counted on, they weren’t exactly asking his opinion.

  He’d just set his pencil down on top of his sketchpad when Kathleen bumped into his desk with her hip. “Sorry,” she said, placing her palm down to steady herself. Then she moved on without another word.

  Josh frowned after her, finding her reticence odd – Kathleen always had something to say even if it wasn’t particularly pertinent – but a glance back at his desk revealed a folded piece of paper and his brows shot up in surprise. Apparently, she did have something to say to him but was resorting to smoke signals to do so. He opened the paper as surreptitiously as possible, intrigued by the brief message:

  Let me buy you a cup of coffee

  Feeling very junior high, Josh refolded the paper and pocketed it. His pulse kicked into high gear, because he was sure this was about the man who’d attacked Sam.

  Ten minutes later he was sliding into a corner booth at Starbucks, Kathleen pushing a tall pumpkin latte toward him. “I take it you didn’t drag me here to ply me with the seasonal special.”

  Glum as he’d ever seen her, Kathleen cast her gaze around before answering. “We got a line on our dead man’s identity. We thought we came up empty when we ran his prints through AFIS, but I just got off the phone with an Agent Bristol out of the Bureau’s New York field office who wanted to know where I’d come across the prints. Seems our search sent up a red flag because they coincide with one of their long term investigations. The owner of the prints has been arrested and held a number of times for a whole slew of offenses, but there was never enough evidence to indict him, or witnesses conveniently forgot what they’d seen.”

  The pumpkin spice suddenly stuck in Josh’s throat. “Mafia?” he guessed, feeling nauseous.

  “Oh yeah. The guy’s name was Vincent Santone. He’s the second or third cousin of a reigning don.”

  Josh pushed the nearly full latte away.

  “What I want to know,” Kathleen continued, looking a bit green in the gills herself, “is what the hell was he doing in Donnie Martin’s hospital room?”

  “Shit.” Josh rubbed a hand over his eyes. “This has to have something to do with the Roadhouse. They’ve been running some numbers out of the back room, seemed like pretty penny ante stuff, but maybe it was a lot bigger than I thought.”

  Kathleen leaned back, assessed him with a look. “You might have mentioned that sooner.”

  “You’re right.” He felt like a shit. “And in all honesty I was planning to. But I got sidetracked by everything that’s been happening, and Sam was worried about the place getting shut down, losing her brother’s benefits…” his voice trailed off at how pathetic that sounded. He was a cop, and he should have said something. He felt the reproach roll off Kathleen in a wave.

  “You think Donnie Martin’s involved?”

  “It makes sense,” he admitted, feeling ill. “To what degree I couldn’t say.” He raked a hand through his hair. “Are the feds coming in on this?”

  “They’ll descend like a plague of locusts.”

  He thought of telling Sam and his stomach rolled dangerously. She didn’t need any more to deal with. But then his mind returned to the puzzle.
“Salinas, the orderly from the hospital, he just moved from New York several months ago. Got the job after Donnie went in.”

  “Watch dog?” Kathleen wondered.

  “Maybe. Though that doesn’t seem like the usual mob tactics. Why wait all these months to eradicate the problem?”

  “Maybe somebody was being cautious. With Martin in a coma, he didn’t exactly present a threat. No need to waste the effort if he wouldn’t be talking.”

  Josh thought there had to be a little more to it, but what, he couldn’t hazard to guess. “You realize that if we’re on the right track this puts Tony Salinas’ sudden demise in a whole new light?”

  “I know,” Kathleen said, miserably. “I’m finding the chances of him dying in an accidental fire a couple days before the attempt on Donnie a little too coincidental.”

  “Maybe his superiors found out what he’d been up to with the local women and decided he was a liability.”

  “Could be,” she agreed. Then her cell phone rang and she pulled it from her jacket, frowning at the number in confusion. “Murphy,” she answered cautiously, followed after a slight pause with “He’s right here.”

  They exchanged a look across the table, Josh’s questioning; Kathleen’s pensive. Then he watched her features slowly rearrange themselves into a mask of obvious distress. He patted his own pocket, realized he’d left his own phone on his desk, and felt the cold sweat of fear pop out on his brow. “Is it Sam?” he demanded with urgency.

  Kathleen held up a hand for patience, asking some question of the person on the phone. But the roaring in his ears prevented Josh from hearing. Something had happened to Samantha. He felt it all the way to his bones. “What’s going on?”

  Kathleen snapped the phone shut and looked at him, regret all over her face. “That was Simms. There’s apparently been a fire in your building. And in the chaos afterward he lost track of Sam.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  SOMEONE was rocking her, Sam thought dreamily. She hadn’t been rocked since she was little. There’d been an old rocking chair on their front porch, and sometimes her mother would hold Sam on her lap. They’d watch the sun set over the farm.

  Then her father had broken it one night in an angry rage, and her mother never rocked her again.

  She lifted her eyelids, slowly. They were so heavy that the effort hurt. In fact, she hurt all over – throat, head, ribs. The cut on her palm was even throbbing for attention, and her head rested awkwardly on her bruised cheek. She needed another dose of medication if she was going to get any sleep. Maybe Simms would bring it to her.

  Maybe Simms knew why the sofa was rocking.

  Simms. Sam’s eyes popped open. What had happened to him after the fire? Hell, what had happened to her? She looked around in confusion, willing both her eyes and her brain to focus. She was woozy, sweating a little, and her stomach rocked in time with the couch.

  Except she wasn’t lying on the couch. She was lying in the middle of a bed. And it wasn’t even the bed that was rocking. It seemed to be the entire room.

  Trying to make sense of her surroundings, Sam shook her head and pushed herself onto an elbow. As she did, the heavy blanket over her slipped away and she realized to her horror that she was naked.

  What the hell was going on?

  Rubbing her eyes with one hand and holding the blanket against her breasts with the other, Sam managed to clear her head enough to get a good look at the room.

  It wasn’t overly large – maybe ten by ten, although the shape wasn’t exactly square – and the walls were paneled in some kind of wood that gleamed darkly in the faint lamplight. The lamp itself was attached to the wall at the side of the queen-sized bed, casting dim light over the blue-striped bedding. There were no windows, she thought momentarily. Or there were, but they were small and high, out of sight behind heavy curtains. Boat windows, she speculated.

  But that didn’t make any sense.

  Still chewing on that, Sam continued her perusal, wondering if this was perhaps some kind of high class hotel room. Although how she’d gotten here she couldn’t quite recall. Maybe Josh had come to pick her up after Simms called him and –

  Sam’s breath caught in an agonizing gasp as her gaze lit on the shadow in the corner. The club-style chair sporting a bold nautical pattern was currently occupied by a familiar blond.

  “You’re awake,” he smiled, flicking a lighter to the tip of his cigarette. And when the glow from the flame illuminated his face Sam saw the signs of age that had previously been hidden.

  This was not the man she’d initially thought.

  “Mr. Wilcox?” she croaked, her voice a study in confusion. She’d met the man only once but his resemblance to his son couldn’t be mistaken.

  “Samantha Martin, I presume?” He chuckled as he pocketed the lighter. Tanned and healthy, he was the very image of the consummate yachtsman and Sam thought yes, a boat. She’d been correct about the windows. And it also explained the subtle rocking.

  But what she was doing on her boss’s yacht still hadn’t computed in her drug-fogged brain.

  Alan Wilcox studied her with open assessment. “And now that we’re both clear on the identity of the other, I think it’s time we had a little talk.” His genial smile faded into a frown. “To look at you, one wouldn’t imagine that you’d be capable of causing such trouble.”

  A trickle of nerves tugged at Sam’s belly. Her very naked belly. She was suddenly quite aware of the fact that she’d somehow parted ways with her clothes.

  And wondered exactly what had happened when they’d been taken.

  Seeming to guess what she was thinking, Wilcox’s smile reappeared, sardonic. “Don’t worry yourself, Samantha. I don’t make a habit of raping unconscious women. I apologize for your state of undress and assure you we’ll rectify that as soon as possible. We removed your clothing as a precaution. Living as you do with one of our city’s finest, I preferred not to take any chances. After the attack you suffered last evening and the information he’s no doubt turning up right now, I wouldn’t put it past him or any of his colleagues – at least, the ones I don’t have on my payroll – to have placed a bug in your clothing. GPS tracking systems can be a real bitch when you’re attempting to flee the country.”

  Sam tried to swallow, but couldn’t work up the spit. Some of what he was saying began to sink in. Somehow, somehow, Alan Wilcox – maybe even Dane – was connected to that attack on her brother. Connected to the attack on her.

  But why?

  Was this all because of some stupid gambling debt? Is that why Donnie had been shot?

  And what could they possibly want with her?

  “I don’t know what Donnie did, or how much he… owes you or whatever, but there’s no way I –”

  Wilcox’s bark of amused laughter cut her off. “Darling. You think I’d go to all this trouble over some paltry amount of money your brother might have taken?” His blue eyes twinkled with mirth but Sam thought there was more lighting them than amusement. Maybe insanity. This whole situation smacked of psychosis. “I’m worth millions, sweet girl. But unfortunately I wouldn’t be able to enjoy those millions from the inside of a jail cell, now would I?”

  “No,” Sam agreed, thinking to placate him until she could figure out a way out of this mess. She was on a boat, headed for God-knew-where. Screaming was probably futile. She saw no indication that her purse had accompanied her, meaning her cell phone wasn’t an option.

  Not to mention the fact that she was naked, unarmed and still wobbly from the drugs, which didn’t leave her a whole lot to work with.

  Drugs, she suddenly thought, mind clearing. There must have been something other than oxygen in that tank. Which meant that fireman probably wasn’t as friendly as he’d seemed.

  “Did you set fire to my fiancé’s building?” The thought was so preposterous she almost couldn’t speak it. But it made sense, in a totally whacked kind a way, because how else could she have ended up here?

 
“Not personally,” he answered, no hesitation. “But I needed to get you out of that building. I had to work fast and it seemed the most likely way to get hold of you without creating any more problems.”

  Without creating any more problems? He’d burned down a freaking building!

  Apparently ignorant of the fact that he was crazy, Wilcox sat back, linked his hands over his stomach. “You see, Samantha – or may I call you Sam? – your brother was a fine employee. Dane was really very fond of him. But he had the misfortune to run an errand for my son that put him at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  The wrong place at the wrong time.

  Oh, well that explained everything then.

  “Your brother was delivering some funds and stumbled upon one of my employees taking care of a little problem that had been plaguing me. Actually, I believe he showed up after the problem had been taken care of, and that’s what probably threw him. He’d been expecting to make a simple stop and go and ended up eyeballing a corpse. You see, I’d made the miscalculation of becoming physically involved with my best friend’s daughter.” He smiled, as if amused at his own folly. “A tight little body, that one. But conversely a loose pair of lips. When I came to my senses after the haze of lust had cleared, I informed her that a continued involvement between us simply wasn’t possible. She threatened to tattle to Daddy. That in itself wouldn’t have been an insurmountable problem – she had compromising photographs, which were embarrassing but not illegal. After all she was nineteen. But the stupid little minx made the mistake of sticking her nose in my business, making off with a computer thumb drive that would have been… damaging in the wrong hands. You understand what I’m saying, don’t you Sam?”

  “Sure.” She nodded her head, started looking for a weapon, because it was obvious where this whole thing was going. Just like the wrap-up at the end of every mystery novel she’d ever read, the killer was spilling his guts to his final victim. Sam thought that kind of thing only happened in fiction or maybe Hollywood, but apparently it had some basis in the truth.