On Borrowed Time

by Jenn McKinlay

  “Got him!” a shout sounded from up above.

  They all glanced up to see Robbie wrestling the older gentleman in a sort of bear hug.

  “Robbie, it’s okay,” Lindsey cried.

  “What?” he asked.

  “You can let him go!” she yelled.

  “No, I—” Robbie’s next words were cut off by a solid clip on the jaw from the older man.

  Lindsey watched in horror as Robbie went down like a sack of cement. Mercifully, Detective Trimble caught him by the collar and eased his fall.

  “Oh, he’s going to have a nasty bruise tomorrow,” Sully said as he stepped out of the boat and came to stand beside them.

  “What did he grab me for?” the older man asked as he shook out his hand.

  “I’m getting a headache,” Emma said. “Trimble, take them to the station. We’ll follow with this group.”

  Lindsey and the others waited for the officers to escort their suspects up the ramp before falling in line behind them. When they reached the pier above, it was to find Nancy, Violet and Charlene waiting along with a very unhappy-looking Ian.

  He glowered at his wife. “Since when have you taken to kayaking in the middle of the dinner shift?”

  “It was a spur-of-the-moment idea,” she said. “Beth and I felt the need for some fresh air.”

  “Really?” he asked. “And it had nothing to do with chasing bad guys or any other dumb ideas?”

  “Dumb?” she asked. Her temper snapped in her blue eyes. “I’ll have you know it was brilliant. Beth and I rigged a line across the channel markers, and sure enough, when they came speeding through, it clotheslined them, bam, dumping them right into the water. It was awesome!”

  “You could have been killed!” Ian roared.

  Never in all the time she’d known him had Lindsey heard Ian raise his voice. He was always quick with a joke and had an easy can-do attitude.

  “Oh, quit being so dramatic,” Mary said. Ian scowled and Mary cupped his face with her hands. “I would never take a risk that would take me away from you.”

  The anger went out of Ian like a puff of smoke. He wrapped his arms around his wife and pressed his forehead to hers.

  “Do me a favor,” he said. “Next time, tell me you’re going to scare five years off of my life, would you?”

  “I will keep you duly informed,” she said.

  Arm in arm, they made their way back to their restaurant.

  Lindsey saw her brother shaking hands with the man that Robbie had tried to subdue. He was a distinguished-looking man with a thick head of gray hair and a neatly trimmed goatee.

  “Vincent, it’s good to see you,” Jack said.

  The man clapped Jack on the shoulder and said, “Not as good as it is to see you, I promise you.”

  He and Jack exchanged uneasy smiles, and Lindsey got the feeling that Jack had been involved in something even more dangerous than she had supposed.

  “Vincent Carrego, I’d like to introduce my sister, Lindsey Norris,” he said.

  “Carrego?” Emma spun around with her hands on her hips, gun at the ready. “The same Carrego who employed Juan Veracruz?”

  “That’s me,” Vincent said.

  “Hands in the air,” Emma said. In a blink, Emma had her gun pointed at Carrego’s head.

  “Whoa!” Jack cried. “Everyone calm down. I can explain everything.”

  “I certainly hope so,” Trimble said. “In the meantime, Mr. Carrego, we’ll be taking the necessary precautions.”

  He moved behind Carrego and cuffed his wrists. Antonia glanced over her shoulder, and sent Vincent a malicious grin.

  “Who’s laughing now?” she asked.

  He gave a careless shrug. “Now doesn’t matter, since I will be . . . in the end.”

  The police station was standing room only. While the rest of the crafternooners had gone with Mary and Ian to the Blue Anchor for a hot beverage and a celebratory dessert, Lindsey had been ordered to the station.

  Lindsey was just happy that it was toasty warm. While Antonia and her thugs were taken in back to be processed, Emma and Trimble wanted to hear Jack’s story in the main room before they talked to Antonia.

  They gathered around one of the police department computers, but because the town had so many firewalls to safeguard information, Lindsey was forced to use Stella’s personal tablet to access the e-mail where she had copied Jack’s micro card.

  She brought up the file with all of her brother’s data. Both he and Vincent looked weak with relief that it was still there. Lindsey might have felt that way if it didn’t look like a bunch of wingdings and other junk. A part of her worried that the file hadn’t transferred correctly.

  “It’s encrypted,” Stella said as if reading her mind. “Here I’ll decode it for us.”

  “While she’s doing that, you can explain,” Emma said to Jack.

  Lindsey noted that Trimble turned on a digital recorder just before her brother began to speak. She nudged Jack to make sure he knew, and he nodded.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Really, we’re the good guys.”

  The group settled in to listen. Lindsey noticed that Stella frequently glanced up from the tablet and watched Jack with a fierce look as if she was overwhelmed that he was here and she was determined that he would stay. Lindsey wondered if the woman knew that her feelings for Jack showed so plainly on her face. She suspected not.

  She glanced around the room until she found Robbie sitting on one of the hard plastic chairs by the window. One of the officers had given him a bag of ice for his jaw, and he sat holding it to his face. She realized she hadn’t thanked him properly for taking on what he thought was a dangerous stranger. She crossed the room and looked at the purpling bruise on his chin.

  “Thank you for what you did out there,” she said. “You were very brave.”

  To her surprise, Robbie actually looked embarrassed.

  “It was nothing,” he said.

  “No, it was something,” she corrected him. “And I really appreciate it.”

  When his green eyes met hers, they sparkled with his usual mischief. “Does this mean you’ll date me?”

  “I—” Caught off guard, Lindsey hesitated.

  “You still married, Vine?” Jack asked as he appeared beside Lindsey.

  “Technically speaking,” Robbie said with a frown.

  “Then the answer is technically no,” Jack said. He took Lindsey by the elbow and led her away.

  “Heh heh heh,” Sully chuckled as they walked by.

  “She’s not dating you either, buddy,” Jack said. “You broke her heart once. That’s enough.”

  “Ha!” Robbie chortled while Sully looked distinctly uncomfortable.

  “Jack,” Lindsey said. “I love you, I really do, but you need to mind your own business.”

  “What?” He looked offended.

  “She’s right,” Emma said. “Especially since we’re waiting for the rest of your explanation. I’m sure your friend would like to get it under way, so we’ll take his handcuffs off.”

  Jack looked at Vincent, who still had his hands behind his back.

  “Oh, sorry, family stuff,” Jack said. Vincent nodded as if he completely understood or maybe he’d like for Jack to get on with it. Hard to say.

  “All right,” Jack said. “Have any of you heard of coffee rust?”

  Lindsey glanced around the room. Judging by the blank stares, they were all as baffled as she had been before Stella and Tom had told her what it was.

  “It’s a fungus that is devastating the coffee crops in Central and South America,” Jack explained. “About a year ago, Vincent called me in to strategize about what to do, since his crop was getting hit so hard. I recommended he diversify into soybeans and oranges.”

  “I took his advice, b
ut it was very difficult. My family has grown coffee for five generations,” Vincent said. “So I tried to keep my coffee crop going.”

  “Then I got a call from Antonia Murroz,” Jack said. “She wanted advice on how to market a new type of coffee plant, but when I went down there, I discovered that she had very little contamination from coffee rust at all.”

  Emma and Trimble exchanged a look as if they were trying to follow him but couldn’t.

  “It was odd,” Jack said. “Why diversify to a new plant if your crops aren’t suffering? With coffee, next season’s berries are borne on this season’s shoots, so rust on this season’s growth reduces next season’s yields. With little contamination from coffee rust, the Murroz family, who has one of the biggest coffee plantations in Brazil, would have had a high yield the following year. On the other hand, the loss of revenue while the new plants were being introduced would be significant.”

  “Okay, that does seem odd,” Trimble said.

  “Exactly, so I got in touch with Vincent and we had a frank discussion about the coffee cartel,” Jack said.

  Officer Wilcox entered the main room from the break room with a coffeepot and a tray full of mugs.

  “It seemed appropriate,” he said.

  “Good call,” Emma said. Officer Wilcox began to pour and Lindsey noted that everyone had a cup, probably in an effort to warm up their insides.

  “Explain about the cartel,” Trimble said.

  “It is essentially a group of coffee growers who agree to fix the prices of the commodity so that they all profit,” Jack said. “Both the Murroz and the Carrego families were long-standing members in the cartel.”

  “Isn’t belonging to a cartel illegal?” Emma glared at Carrego as if sizing him up for a prisoner’s onesie.

  “In my grandfather’s day, it was a matter of survival, but in mine,” he paused and spread his hands wide, “I found I was better served to be the undercover cartel member for the Brazilian Federal Police.”

  “That’s brave,” Trimble said. Emma looked at him and he said, “What? It is.”

  “It was dangerous, but clearly imperative as one by one the members in the cartel were losing their crops to the fungus,” Vincent said. “Since Antonia had hired Jack, I convinced him to be our inside man and find out what she was doing.”

  “And I found out,” Jack said. “That document”—he pointed to the screen on Stella’s tablet—“shows how Antonia and her hired thugs used the wind to spread the fungus to her competitors’ crops. At first, I assumed she had so many charts and graphs about the weather for her own crops, but I soon realized she wasn’t just tracking the wind. She was harnessing it to spread the fungus to destroy the competition with the added bonus that she wouldn’t be tied to the cartel’s agreed-upon pricing and could charge a small fortune for her coffee, since no one else had enough of a crop to give her any competition.”

  Vincent muttered something in Portuguese that sounded very unflattering.

  “Come and look,” Stella said. “It’s all here.”

  Trimble and Emma peered over Stella’s shoulder while she explained the document to them.

  Satisfied, Trimble straightened up and turned to Jack. “That’s all very well and good, but it doesn’t tell me who killed Juan Veracruz or why?”

  “Juan worked for me,” Vincent said. “He was to meet Jack in the library, and Jack would give his information to Juan, who would bring it back to me to share with the rest of my . . . associates. We knew it wasn’t safe for Jack to try to meet with me. We suspected that Antonia was already onto him.”

  “I had a hard time getting out of Brazil,” Jack said. Lindsey knew him well enough to know he was understating how dangerous it had been. She glanced at Stella and saw that she knew it, too. “Antonia’s people caught up to me right as I was downloading the information. She had figured out what I was doing and had ordered them to kill me. I got out of Brazil with the micro card and the clothes on my back. I didn’t even have time to email the information or back it up. I figured once I handed the chip off, I would be safe, but no.”

  “You should have called me,” Tom said. He was frowning at Jack. “That’s what I do.”

  “I know you,” Jack said. “You’d have gotten yourself killed trying to help me. I couldn’t have that on my conscience.”

  Tom made an impatient noise and looked at Stella. “It’s like he forgets that security is my job.”

  “When I arrived at the library, I was pretty wracked, running on no sleep or food for two days,” Jack said. “Lindsey let me use the back room and I fell asleep waiting for my contact. When I woke up, two men were grappling and one of them yelled for me to get the hell out of there.”

  Jack’s eyes took on a faraway look. “I never would have left if I’d known he was going to be killed. I thought they were just beating each other up, and when one was unconscious, the other would come after me. I knew I couldn’t risk losing the information, so I hid it in one of the library books.”

  “A Wrinkle in Time,” Lindsey said. “Clever.”

  Jack bowed his head. “I was hoping you’d figure out the clue if I didn’t make it back.”

  “Wait. Rewind,” Emma said. “What clue?”

  “When Antonia nabbed Jack, she put him on the phone with me for a moment,” Lindsey said. “He told me not to panic, that it wasn’t as if he was being taken to Camazotz.”

  “Oh, that’s the dark planet,” Trimble said. He looked cheered that he’d figured it out. Emma frowned at him and he said, “It’s a great book. You should read it.”

  Emma dug her fingers into her hair as if to keep herself from wrapping them around someone’s neck. “So who killed Juan Veracruz?”

  “At a guess?” Jack asked. “I’d say one of your thugs back there. You may want to start squeezing them to roll over on Antonia.”

  Emma studied him. She gave a nod to Trimble, who released Vincent from his cuffs. As he rubbed his wrists, Lindsey stepped forward and poured him a cup of coffee.

  “It may not be as good as you’re used to,” she said.

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” he said as he took a bracing sip.

  “Was it one of your men?” she asked. Vincent met her gaze, and she knew that he knew what she was talking about.

  “Yes, one of my men followed you on your beach walk,” he said.

  “Did he also toss my apartment?” Lindsey asked. She was feeling a head of steam beginning to roil.

  “No, they followed you to make sure you were safe,” Vincent said. “I was afraid Antonia meant to harm you in order to get to Jack.”

  “Wait! Someone searched your apartment?” Jack asked.

  “Yes, luckily, I was spending the night at Sully’s,” Lindsey said. “Or it could have gone very badly.”

  “What?” Jack squawked in an alarmingly high-pitched voice.

  “Really?” Lindsey asked. “You’re shocked?”

  “But you . . . but he . . .” Jack stuttered.

  “Oh, quit worrying,” Lindsey said. “Being with Sully kept me safe the night my place was ransacked, and then Robbie spent the next night at my apartment with me, also keeping me safe.”

  Jack went wobbly in the knees. “I think I need a drink.”

  Lindsey laughed at him. “You’re an idiot.”

  “An idiot with heartburn,” he said. “I’m glad I’m staying through the holidays. Obviously, a visit to check out your relationship situation is long overdue. Ha! Get it? Overdue.”

  Lindsey and Stella groaned and then shared a small smile.

  “We’ll check the fingerprints we took in your apartment against our guests and see if anything hits,” Emma said.

  “I’ll bet we have a match with one of Antonia’s goons,” Trimble said.

  “Am I free to go then?” Vincent asked.

  “You are rel
eased on your own recognizance,” Emma said. “But don’t leave town—yet.”

  Lindsey noticed that Jack was looking a little shaky. She wondered what had happened to him while he’d been held by Antonia. Judging by the bruises she could see, he hadn’t had an easy time of it.

  “I think you need medical attention now,” Lindsey said.

  “Well, it’s been a few days since I ate or slept,” he said.

  “I’m sending for a doctor. I want photographs taken of all of your bruises and a professional’s description of your condition,” Emma said. “If I can’t get Antonia on murder, I want to make damn sure I can get her on kidnapping and assault.”

  “I’ll order you some food from the Blue Anchor,” Lindsey said. “Clam chowder okay to start?”

  “That would be heaven,” Jack said.

  She watched as Stella helped him to a back room in the station house. Again, Lindsey was swamped with relief that her brother was here and he was okay.

  She turned to face Emma and Detective Trimble, who were again studying the file on the computer.

  “Do you think you’ll be able to stop her?” she asked.

  “We’ll do our best,” Emma said. “It’s international so it could get dicey.”

  “I’m calling in some help from headquarters,” Trimble said. “We’ll nail her. Don’t you worry.”

  Lindsey nodded. She felt better seeing the determined expressions on their faces.

  The room began to empty as everyone else had been cleared to go home. Lindsey was just pushing through the front door when Emma called her name.

  “Yeah,” Lindsey answered.

  “Nice work on the micro card and stopping Antonia from escaping,” she said.

  “Thanks,” Lindsey said. She was almost out the door when Emma added, “And when everything calms down, we’ll be having a meeting with the mayor about the library director’s exact job description.”

  Lindsey wasn’t sure if it was a threat or a promise, but she scurried outside, pretending she hadn’t heard her.

  “This is a first,” Beth said as she entered the room carrying a bowl of spinach dip in one arm and a plate of cubed bread in the other.