Stacked Deck

by Tracy Watkins

  JD didn’t like mysteries. Especially ones where he was involved.

  About an hour later, she finally she opened her eyes and said, “Good morning.”

  He didn’t know exactly how to reply to that. It seemed so friendly. So natural. As if she’d just awakened in her own bed after a long night’s sleep.

  He nodded.

  “How big is your apartment?” she asked.

  “It’s big. Why?”

  “You’re going to have a guest.”

  He stared at her. Under other circumstances, that might have sounded like a great idea. But not today. “Who might that be?”

  “Me. I’m your new girlfriend. Your rich widow squeeze.”

  “If our first date is any indication of our future, I think I’ll break up with you right now.”

  “You were pretty excited about me a few hours ago.”

  “That was before people started shooting at me.”

  “When I explain things to you, you’ll be more than happy to have me as your girlfriend. But—”

  “I know, you can’t tell me anything now. I’m supposed to wait until you feel like letting me in out of the dark.”

  “Yes. When we get to my villa it’ll all become clear.”

  She got up, tugged on her dirty dress to get it into a more favorable position and walked off. He saw her take something out of her purse. It was a PDA. She began to text a message to someone.

  Maybe she was some kind of undercover agent. At least then he could make some sense out of all of this. Maybe she was here to take Giambi down. Maybe she had been the target last night.

  He didn’t like that idea at all. But the more he thought about it, the more it made an odd kind of sense. She shows up just when Giambi needs her, papers and money in place. Then she courts him, saying he’s the reason she’s in Monaco.

  She was going to use him to get to Giambi.

  When Beth finished texting a message to Allison Gracelyn, she saw JD staring at the road, bouncing from foot to foot, restless, chomping at the bit.

  She needed to have a nice long talk with him, convince him where his best interest lay. The hit attempt might have been on Giambi. It was Giambi’s car and those guys might have assumed he was in it. But why were they after the man?

  She didn’t have the slightest idea. Giambi stayed very clean, for a gambling man.

  Could the cheating crew from Vegas have followed her to Monaco?

  She immediately dismissed that idea as preposterous.

  She walked back to JD. As they traveled along the highway a small pickup truck approached from the west.

  JD asked, “You owe money anywhere?”

  “No.”

  “Serious enemies?”

  “Not that I know of. There are people who probably don’t like me for one reason or another, but nothing that would make them hire a team of killers to come after me,” she lied. A necessary part of her job with Oracle. “How many people in Monaco drive a Bugatti?”

  “There might be one or two others.”

  “Anyone attempt to hit Giambi in the recent past?”

  “No. He’s generally well-guarded. He takes security seriously. Men like him have plenty of enemies.”

  “It’s possible then,” she said, “that you were right. The would-be killers saw the car leave the garage late at night. Nobody else drives that car. They couldn’t see us with the tinted windows. They followed us to the shop. It’s dark. We went inside. They waited and when we came out all hell broke loose. We saw them so we needed to be killed. Only we got away.”

  “Right. What else could it be?”

  She didn’t want to answer his loaded question so she focused on the lone truck nearing where they stood, next to the road in a copse of trees.

  “Let me handle this,” Beth said. “If he’s looking to pick me up, you should act like you can hardly walk. I don’t want him to get suspicious, like we’re highway robbers or something.”

  She walked out, limping. She handed JD the jacket and waved to the truck driver. He pulled up and stopped. Beth was so happy, she was nearly giddy with excitement.

  “Vous gens dans accident?”

  Beth spoke in French, telling him they had been assaulted, their car stolen, but that they hadn’t reported it yet because of her father.

  “Why. You are afraid of your father?” the stocky driver asked in French.

  “Yes. He’s got a very bad temper,” she replied.

  “Ah, fathers. I am one myself.”

  “I hope you don’t have such a bad temper as mine.”

  “I hope not.”

  “He was,” she said, “the kind that might just have somebody killed.”

  “Then maybe I should go away from you quickly.”

  “I’d much rather you were more heroic and helped me get to Nice, where my friends will ensure my safety.”

  He considered that for a moment. Glancing from time to time over to JD as if to consider the risks.

  She motioned to JD, and he walked toward the truck.

  The driver nodded and told them to get in. He didn’t ask any more questions. He was a weathered guy, aging fast. He wore a fedora and suspenders over his blue shirt.

  It was a really lovely morning, sunny, bright, the sky with only a few scattered clouds. She stared at the countryside while the driver and JD talked about soccer, racing, the French Open. Men had the same conversations everywhere in the world. Sports. They loved sports the way women loved clothes. Music was said to be the universal language, but she believed it took third place to sports and clothes.

  Their conversation gave her a chance to consider her next step. This little operation that she had hoped would go quickly was now a very big mess. Now she had to salvage it.

  Courage, as Hemingway once said, was grace under pressure. She didn’t know how much grace was involved, but she was happy to report to herself that, having survived two major encounters, she could handle herself very well, thank you very much. And JD, for all his complaining about wanting to know who and what she was, had showed her a lot of courage. If things were going to go downhill, he was somebody she wanted at her side.

  Chapter 12

  S alvatore Giambi sat on his balcony having breakfast and thinking about all his mounting problems. He felt a lot like a man sitting on the beach watching the water recede and wondering how big the wave was going to be when the wall of water came crashing down on him.

  Casinos were nothing if not an endless stream of problems.

  He dropped a shot of Kahlúa into his coffee, then settled in his favorite deck chair to listen to his phone messages.

  The fourth one was from JD. Some bizarre story about somebody trying to kill him and Anne Hurley, crashing the car, running off into the countryside.

  “What the hell is this?” he said out loud, angry at the crap he was listening to. His Bugatti had been wrecked? Was this some kind of joke? Had to be, he thought. That damn JD was having some fun with him.

  When he tried to call JD he got his message box. He tried three more times.

  Nothing.

  He decided the man was probably sleeping. With any luck, he was sleeping with Anne Hurley.

  Giambi used the walkie-talkie function on his cell phone and ordered one of his many minions to go check JD’s apartment.

  Ten minutes later, Giambi got a call. “He’s not there, sir,” the male voice said. “I don’t think Mister JD has been back all night.”

  Giambi figured JD and the lady were in a hotel somewhere. Could be anywhere. Hell, maybe they drove up to Paris. Nothing for Giambi to do but wait until he showed up. Giambi loved JD as he would a son, but he trusted JD because of the racer’s self-interest. Giambi was JD’s last best hope of getting back into racing.

  He played the message again. It didn’t sound like JD was drunk. The voice sounded strained.

  The idea that the Bugatti had been shot up and crashed, that JD and Anne were hiding somewhere irritated Giambi to the core.


  Then another thought slipped in, maybe they had been kidnapped and this was only the first call. The next would be a ransom call. Or, maybe this was an elaborate set-up. Anne Hurley was going to ask him to come and fetch JD. He’d walked right into a trap of some kind.

  Giambi played it again. The message didn’t sound like the cool JD he’d come to know and trust. It sounded like some guy under a great deal of stress, but then gunfire and a crash would do that to any man…if he was telling the truth.

  Right off Giambi leaped to the worst conclusions. That was his habit and he was good at digging out the truth.

  He called his security chief. “Get up here, now.”

  “Yes, sir, but first—”

  “Just get up here. We have a problem.”

  When Vincenzio Leoni showed up a few minutes later Giambi had him listen to the tape a couple of times.

  “Well, what do you think?” Giambi asked. He could hear the tension mounting in his own voice.

  “Doesn’t sound like JD. I don’t know what to think. I haven’t heard any news on the Bugatti.”

  “It doesn’t sound right to me,” Giambi said. “It’s not like him to joke about my car. Listen to what he says and to how he says it.”

  He played it again.

  Vincenzio scratched his head and nodded. “He doesn’t sound right. Definitely sounds like he’s under stress. He knows that car is your pride and joy.”

  “Maybe somebody grabbed them.”

  “Could be.” Vincenzio adjusted himself as he seemed to do whenever he was faced with a problem. It was a habit that irritated Giambi.

  Giambi thought about his car being wrecked. JD being gone, and that woman having something to do with it. “Get somebody out to the crash site and check this thing out. I’d rather we be the ones to find my car.”

  “Could be the woman’s involved. In her background, though, nothing suggests it.”

  “Maybe it’s not a real background.”

  “We did a global search.”

  “I keep telling you, you can’t trust the Internet.”

  The whole evening came back to Giambi and it suddenly painted a scenario that he didn’t like. “Goddamn. She kept insisting on going out to our garage last night. Never gave a real reason. I thought…hell I don’t know what I thought.”

  “If it was a kidnapping,” Vincenzio offered, “you’d have gotten a ransom demand. Maybe that’s not what happened at all.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Somebody follows the car. It’s your car. Nobody else in Monaco drives that color Bugatti.”

  “A hit. They thought I was driving!”

  “Could be. They shot the car up. They wouldn’t do that if it was a kidnap and ransom. You only do that when you’re trying to kill somebody,” Vincenzio insisted. “Maybe the shooter thought you were driving.”

  Giambi hadn’t been awake long enough or had enough coffee to think straight. But now, with Vincenzio spelling it out, he could see things clearly.

  “And then this shooter finds JD instead. He and Anne Hurley get away, and they’re hiding out now, somewhere they think is safe.”

  “It’s the best theory we’ve got right now,” Vincenzio said. “I’m thinking it’s a botched hit.”

  Giambi lit another cigar and poured another shot of Kahlúa in his coffee while his security chief took care of sending somebody to find the car. The police would be all over this if Vincenzio couldn’t get to the Bugatti first.

  Giambi’s stress was escalating and it wasn’t even noon yet.

  “Get everybody on this. If there’s a contract out on me I want to know where it’s coming from. I’m gonna find out and when I do, I’ll hang the bastards head-first off the bow of my boat, throw some chum in the water and let the fucking sharks eat their faces. I’ll stick their heads in a bucket of scorpions first to get things warmed up.”

  He came up with about twenty ways to torture and kill the imagined kidnappers.

  “What if it’s the woman behind this?” Vincenzio asked.

  Giambi backed up and stared at the man. “You think she’s in this?”

  “I wouldn’t rule it out.”

  “What would the game be?”

  “Money. Revenge. Who knows?”

  Giambi thought about this for a moment. “I’m not ruling anything out.”

  Giambi hated to think that Anne Hurley might be involved. He liked her and he didn’t want to have to torture and kill someone so fine as her. He’d have her killed and be done with it. Still, he didn’t like that modern women were getting more and more into traditionally male crimes. It just didn’t seem right. If women got as bad as men the world would be finished. That’s how he saw it.

  “I hope it’s not her,” he said.

  “Maybe she’s too good to be true.”

  In Giambi’s experience, he didn’t believe he’d ever met a man who didn’t have some crime in his past. But he liked to think there were still virgins and pure females…somewhere.

  Ten minutes later the bad news got just a little worse. A farmer had found the car and the police were at the scene.

  Giambi phoned Vincenzio. “Let’s get out there. I want it towed to the shop. Tell the police I’m on my way. Get my chopper ready,” Giambi ordered. Vincenzio hadn’t even gotten out of the casino yet.

  “It’s your pilot’s day off.”

  “Well, cancel it. If somebody is gunning for me, I’m flying overhead. Right now, until further notice, nobody has days off.”

  He began listing all the enemies he had, or ones he might have acquired lately. One of the big problems with still being in Monaco when the Prince had pushed out the Cosa Nostra and other “unsavory” elements, was that people might think Giambi was playing both sides of the street. Helping the prince and, thereby, helping himself. Not true, but the thought could be enough to put a contract out on him.

  And there were other people with other reasons. Even the damn head of the Monaco police could have set it up, for all he knew.

  “You can’t trust anybody in this miserable, backstabbing world,” Giambi stated. If he had a philosophy in life, that was it.

  Chapter 13

  W hen the truck driver dropped them off on a side street near the middle of Nice on the Rue Rossini, saying it was only a block from the Boulevard Victor Hugo, he wished them well.

  “Fathers,” he said, “can be tough customers where daughters are concerned. I know. I have five girls myself. They add years to your life, then take them away after about age eight.”

  He laughed, waved and drove off.

  Beth said, “I need a Starbucks. You know where I can find one?”

  “This is France. The French like their shot of espresso, a petit noir or noisette with a Gauloise cigarette first thing in the morning. You ask for a standardized American coffee and you could end up under the guillotine for treason against French culture.”

  Caffeine, when it came down to it, was caffeine, Beth mused. She’d gladly accept a petit noir at the first coffee shop they came to.

  The early morning denizens of the city acted like her and JD’s disheveled appearance was just another example of a night gone bad. Or good, she thought, depending on how you looked at a young couple who had apparently spent their evening in the woods.

  They both cleaned up as best they could in the communal bathroom, drank their coffee and ate croissants, two each, then went looking for a car rental agency.

  They took a taxi to Côte D’AzurAirport and JD rented a Peugeot. They had stopped talking long ago. Morning and the harsh realities of being tired and hunted left little energy or desire for conversation. And JD had, thankfully, stopped asking questions.

  Beth stared out the window as he drove back to Monaco. All she wanted was a shower and a bed, and some time to think about how to handle Giambi.

  Half an hour later they slipped down the winding road into Monaco, the wind blowing in her hair. She told him where her villa was. They drove in silence towa
rd the hills above the Monte Carlo.

  Her villa loomed straight ahead. “Turn in here,” she told him. “That’s my place, but drive past it first. I want to see if I have any visitors.”

  “You expect any?”

  “You never know.”

  They sat outside about two blocks away just watching the place. People were coming and going, but nothing looked out of the ordinary.

  “Let’s go in.”

  He pulled in front of the villa, parked and they went in.

  “I’m going to take a shower, eat a real breakfast, then sit down and tell you everything you need to know about what is really going on.”

  He gave her a look.

  “I’ll be out in no time, then the bathroom’s all yours.”

  “Can’t wait,” he said with a sardonic smile.

  She headed in to take a shower.

  But then he said, “You know, on second thought, it might be a good idea for me to go on back to the casino. Make sure Giambi isn’t going crazy.”

  Beth stopped and turned to him. “After all we’ve been through, after all your questions, you don’t want to hear what I have to say?”

  “Maybe I don’t think you’re ever going to tell me anything I can believe.”

  She walked back to him. “Judge it when it happens. You leave now, it’ll never happen. There are fresh coffee beans and a grinder. Eggs and toast. I’ll be out in fifteen minutes.”

  “What happens if some of these uninvited friends show up? You have any guns in the house?”

  “No. Warn me and then run like hell.”

  Beth turned and limped down the hall. Her foot was feeling a little better, but she couldn’t wait to get out of her dress and soak under the water. She wondered if she should have invited him into her shower, all that steam and soap might have made for an interesting morning. Of course, if she did that, she might just have to tell him the truth about herself, and the truth wasn’t something she was ready to tell.

  JD stared at Anne Hurley until she vanished into the bathroom. This is just great, he thought. He felt himself sinking into a really bad frame of mind.