by D. L. Wood
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
She shrugged, hesitating to answer. “It’s stupid.”
“Come on.”
She sniffed, using the moment to decide whether it was worth it to say anything. “I was thinking about where we’d be right now if all this wasn’t happening.” She immediately regretted sharing and, embarrassed, looked out towards the sea.
“Not stupid. So what do you think we’d be doing?” he asked, playing along as the Jeep bounced, speeding ever closer to whatever awaited them at the LeClaire.
“Jack, I don’t want to do this.”
“Come on. What do you think we’d be doing?” he pressed.
“I don’t know. Eating somewhere? Sitting on the beach?” she offered lamely.
“Pathetic. Isn’t writing part of your job description? I would have expected better.”
She hated and loved that he could joke at a time like this. How does he do it? “Well, what do you think we’d be doing?”
“Hmmm.” His eyes settled on the distance where they stayed for several silent seconds.
“Well?” she egged, turning to look at him.
“Shhh. Hold on, I’m thinking.”
Despite herself, the corner of her mouth turned up slightly, which she realized had been his goal. She lightly swiped his arm. “Come on—”
“Okay, okay,” he mock-whined. “Forget morning. It’d be night. A thousand stars out. And you’d be in that dress, you know, the black one you wore that first night . . .”
It tumbled out, complete and serious, belying any suggestion that he’d made it up on the spot or that he was playing. It wasn’t the answer she expected. It was far more personal. And it drew her in, pulling her focus to him even more as he stared straight ahead, eyes unwavering from the road.
“. . . And we’d walk down that pier, right by Mendoza’s. Right to the edge. And I’d make you close your eyes. Really tight. And then I’d tell you to listen very closely, to see if you could hear the change in the water hitting the pilings as the next boat came in. And then . . .” He trailed off and her eyebrows arched, begging the answer. He cut his green eyes at her, flashing with amusement. “. . . being the wonderful, uncomplicated, no-strings attached friend that I am, I’d shake your hand, just to let you know how I feel.”
She let loose a full-on grin, shaking her head as she turned away and rolled her eyes. “You’re impossible,” she muttered.
“Then we’d walk back inside, open a bottle of the most expensive red wine in the house, and I’d make you tell me how you got that little scar on your chin,” he finished, running a finger along his own chin in the same spot where her scar was, “just there.”
“Well then, I guess after that I’d make you tell me how you got that huge scar on your back, right over your left shoulder.”
He cut his eyes at her again, seeming surprised. “Noticed that did you?”
“Mmm-hmm.”
Then the Jeep rounded a bend in the road, bringing up the resort stretch of beach, with its large communes of buildings and palm-dotted drives. The LeClaire’s entrance sign rolled into view a few hundred yards away, and all thoughts of night stars and red wine and trading stories of scars evaporated, as if they’d never been.
TWENTY-ONE
The telephones at the station had been ringing off and on since the first story aired around seven-thirty that morning. Sampson sat at his desk, twirling a pen, while beat officers fielded the phones. Despite getting several dozen calls, few had provided even remotely relevant tips and, of those, none had panned out. Nine-fifteen already and no sign of them, Sampson recounted, watching the clock as he took another swig of Pepto, his third that morning.
The call he had gotten at McConnaughey’s the night before was about a burglary at a downtown duty-free jewelry shop. He had gone straight there after leaving her cottage and was still there at eleven when Korrigan’s people called him asking where McConnaughey was. Dover, the man Korrigan had sent to McConnaughey’s house, was supposed to have made it back to the hotel with her by then. But he hadn’t shown.
They knew why once Sampson found Dover’s corpse in the gully at the bottom of the hillside. Worse, McConnaughey’s car was gone and there was no sign of her. As expected, the call to Korrigan had not gone well.
“You understand that this is your problem, Detective Sampson?” Korrigan barked.
“And I’ll rectify it,” Sampson growled back.
“I certainly hope so, because the last thing I want to do is call him and tell him that she has disappeared with that flash drive.”
“No, no. We’ll have her in eight hours or less. I promise you.”
“Detective, I hope for your sake you’re correct. I paid good money for your services, and I can’t have a reputation of accepting less than satisfactory results. You can see how that would negatively affect the success of my projects. You can see how I would be forced to . . . respond negatively.”
“I said eight hours.”
“I’ll be counting the minutes,” Korrigan spat. “Literally.”
Sampson had come up with the idea to frame McConnaughey and Collings in the hope that it would bring them back to him, and he, in turn, could deliver them to Korrigan as soon as possible. It wouldn’t be hard to come up with a convincing story that they had simply escaped. The island’s sad excuse for a police force was a bumbling circus, anyway. That development wouldn’t exactly seem far-fetched.
And so, at five-thirty that morning, he had placed the anonymous call to the department about a problem at Kreinberg’s the night before involving “her neighbor.” When the third shift officer finally found Ruby’s body down the beach from her house where Korrigan had dumped it, Sampson was assigned to the case, just as he knew he would be. Between the knife they’d taken from McConnaughey’s, and a tip from the “anonymous caller” that McConnaughey had been seen leaving Ruby’s house late in the night, she was now the prime suspect. Hopefully, the public would unwittingly assist him in getting her back.
Until then his neck was on the line. For the first time since he took the payoff from Korrigan, he wondered if he had made a mistake. It wasn’t the illegality that bothered him; it was the question of whether he had chosen to go to work for the wrong man. Sampson had been a cop for nearly fifteen years. Early in his career, he had learned two truths: one, being on the right side of the law was not profitable; and, two, if something wasn’t profitable it was a waste of time. So he manipulated the job to make some extra cash, though it was never enough to give him more than a better apartment and a snappier wardrobe than the rest of his brethren-in-blue. It worked for years until Internal Affairs accused him of confiscating narcotics evidence for resale. They hadn’t been able to prove anything, but he had left the force just to put some distance between him and that possibility.
He figured his career in law enforcement was over for good, until a couple of years later a bar buddy mentioned that the Caribbean took med students nobody else wanted. Wondering if the same might be true of cops, he applied to a dozen departments, including St. Gideon’s. Chief Hunt must not have even checked beyond his phony references, because he gave Sampson a job as soon as he got the application and never looked back.
As it turned out, though, neither the job nor the island lived up to Sampson’s expectations. St. Gideon may have been a vacationer’s paradise, but for a guy used to the fast lane, it was a wasteland. And his time on the job was a nightmare. He was surrounded by fools and a boss who was more interested in becoming governor than being chief. Worst of all, there was no extracurricular business of any significance to be had. He had arrived on the island with plans to make a fortune as a player in the drug trade he was certain flourished in every Caribbean locale. But the best he had been able to do was cut deals with the small timers on the island. After two years, he had finally had enough. He was in the middle of planning his return to the States when he had gotten the call from Korrigan.
He wasn’t sure how K
orrigan had known he was dirty in the first place. But when he called three weeks ago, Korrigan made him the kind of proposition he had been craving for two years. Fifty thousand up front and the promise of a real job in Miami when it was all over. Sampson couldn’t say yes fast enough.
“Pete!”
A couple of desks over, a young officer in his late twenties held a telephone receiver against his chest.
“What?” Sampson scowled.
“I got a guy on the phone I think maybe you should talk to.”
“Yeah, why’s that?”
“Just seems different. Keeps ranting about how it’s his civic duty to report this.”
Sampson glared in exasperation. “How many times did he ask about a reward?”
“Twice already.”
“Just screen it, take the information and check it out. You know, police work,” he barked, waving him off and swiveling his chair away. Sampson snatched a chipped mug off his desk and chugged a hefty swig of black coffee, chasing it with another dose of Pepto. Behind him he heard the officer muttering.
“Yeah, okay. Shores Motel . . . Yeah, yeah. So no girl, but . . . what . . . wait, what makes you think he might have been shot—”
“Wait a minute!” Sampson bellowed, lurching for the officer’s desk. “Gimme that phone!”
* * * * *
Twenty minutes later Sampson was standing in room twenty-four of the Shores Motel. The flowered spread lay crumpled in a pile on the floor where he’d thrown it with the sheets and pillows after tearing apart the bed. Every drawer had been opened and left there. The sad, faded picture of a palm tree had been removed from the wall, its back ripped off. Nothing.
“So, um, you guys are gonna fix this back up, right?”
Sampson ignored the ratty clerk and stood in the center of the room, his head swiveling back and forth as he surveyed the space for anything they might have missed.
An officer exited the bathroom. “Anything?” Sampson growled at him.
“No,” answered the officer, shaking his head. “Nothing.”
Sampson pushed him out of the way and stepped inside the tiny room. Shower, sink, cabinet—all clean. He strode stiffly back to the clerk.
“And you’ve got nothing from him?”
“Just a signature—”
“Yeah, the fake name.”
“Well, he paid in cash, man, you know? And look, we aren’t the kind of place that cares about names so much. Hey listen, what about the reward? I told you what I know and . . .”
But Sampson wasn’t listening anymore. He resumed scanning the room, revolving on the spot to look at the television, the door, the window, the bed, the nightstand . . . He stopped, studying the nightstand again. They’d already checked the phone book and the worn-edged hotel notepad beside it. But the pen beside that . . . It hadn’t registered earlier. The pen with the cap off, as if someone had just used it.
Stepping desperately to the nightstand, he took the pad and held it up to eye level, flat to the light spilling in through the open curtains. Tiny shadows betrayed indentions on the page. Indentions that formed a list of things, one of which was circled.
“You,” he snapped at the clerk, “get me a pencil!”
TWENTY-TWO
The LeClaire Resort, a sprawling property surrounded by a four-foot-high plaster fence and even taller bushes, sat on the right side of the road. In the far distance behind it, the ocean glistened in the mid-morning light. On the left, the land sloped gradually upward, until reaching the base of what seemed to be a series of steep hills leading into a forested area. As they neared the gated entrance to the LeClaire, Chloe readied herself. But to her surprise, they rolled right past.
“What are you doing?” Chloe asked in surprise, as Jack kept going.
“I need to get a sense of what we’re dealing with here,” he answered as he turned left into the parking lot of a collection of buildings that housed a crafts shop, market, and some kind of chicken restaurant. “Just pull out your cell phone—act like you’re taking some shots.”
Because of the slope of the land, they had a decent view overlooking the resort property. The main building at the center was the original hotel, containing hundreds of standard rooms. Surrounding that were a dozen stand-alone units that resembled large private homes. These upscale buildings had their own pools and hot tubs, as well as tall, bushy landscaping to seclude those areas from the view of other guests. The communal property at the front entrance of the resort contained a large fountain and several rows of high hedges. Traffic was minimal. Visible security consisted of a single guard posted in the shed by the gate.
“All right,” Jack said, starting up the car and pulling back onto the road. “We can’t park here. The Jeep might be noticed. Let’s see if there’s a turn off or something up ahead between here and the next place. We really need the Jeep to be within short walking distance of either place, in case we’ve got to make a run for it.”
The FountainSea was the next resort down, about a quarter mile from the LeClaire. They decided to walk through the FountainSea to the beach, then head down to the LeClaire. The hope was that, by coming in from the beach entrance, they would appear to belong at the hotel and draw less attention when they went to the business office. Unfortunately, there weren’t many good parking options to choose from. Their best one turned out to be an area behind a vacant shop on the left, about halfway between the two resorts. Jack followed its gravel parking lot around to the back where it ended in a short, wide, dirt driveway leading to a rusted-out shed. Most of the dirt driveway was completely grown over by the forest.
“I wish we had time to circle around, come in from another direction and park somewhere up in the forest. We’d have a longer walk, but it’d be safer.”
“We don’t have more time.”
“Yeah, I know,” he responded, regret in his voice as he stepped on the gas again, inching as far into the forest as the dense vegetation would allow. They got out and worked together, breaking off vines and branches and laying them over the Jeep in an attempt to camouflage it from view. Though not completely hidden, by the time they were finished it was at least very hard to see the Jeep unless you went to the trouble of actually coming around the building and going down the dirt driveway.
From there it was a five-minute walk down the road’s pebble-strewn shoulder to the beginning of the FountainSea property. To avoid unnecessary contact with the gate guard, in between passing cars they pushed through the tall hedges that created a natural fence around the resort. Brushing themselves off and straightening up, they joined hands and gave every impression of a happy couple embarking on their day together.
“You really think this’ll work?” Chloe asked, doubt burgeoning now that they were actually here, following a long sidewalk into the heart of the property.
“Absolutely. We’ll be fine.”
“What about you, with your leg? That’s got to be killing you. You’re hardly showing it.”
“It’s not that bad. Tylenol’s helping.” He’d been popping them like candy every hour.
He steered them towards the lobby, staying on the concrete paths generously lined with oversized ferns and lanky palms. This resort was smaller than the LeClaire, consisting solely of three adjoining buildings located close to the ocean. As they went, they did their best to avoid eye contact with anyone. It wasn’t hard. The few people they passed weren’t interested in them in the least. Chloe’s heart raced as they turned onto the last path and neared the lobby doors.
“Here we go,” Jack muttered, as he pushed one open and held it for her.
The lobby was bright and clean, dotted with people milling about, slowly getting started on another day in paradise. A desk clerk glanced over as they walked in, then, unimpressed, turned back to his computer to finish whatever he was doing for the impatient guest gesturing animatedly on the other side of the counter. A few groups were scattered here and there, some checking in for sightseeing tours, others getting breakf
ast at the hotel café. A couple of people sat in overstuffed chairs facing the water, drinking coffee and perusing copies of USA Today. Jack slipped his arm around Chloe’s waist as they passed through the heart of the community area and headed to the outside deck.
“John said to wait for them out by the pool, that they were running late,” Jack offered, starting in on the script they’d come up with to make it seem like they belonged there. He spoke in a slightly louder than normal tone, one that wouldn’t draw attention, but would be casually overheard by anyone that might be listening.
“Okay, but ten more minutes and I’m ordering. I’m starving,” Chloe answered back, leaning into him in a friendly way as they walked purposefully towards the rear of the room. It had seemed a silly ruse to Chloe, but Jack hoped it would throw off anyone who might notice that they looked a little like the photos from the broadcast that morning. As it was, no one seemed to care.
Jack squeezed her waist reassuringly as they pushed through richly stained teak doors to the ocean-side pool and grille deck. There was more activity here; mostly young families getting an early start before the heat of the day set in. Several young children dashed around the pool’s edge, screaming in delight. Chloe nearly tripped over a girl with jet-black pigtails and neon pink arm floaties, who came out of nowhere to jump bravely into the three-foot end of the pool. The pure joy in the little girl’s laughter filled Chloe’s heart with longing for her camera and what she knew would have been a wonderful shot.
They left the pool area by way of a meandering concrete path through lush, tropical landscaping that ultimately ended in the gritty sand of a long stretch of beach.
Jack eyed her questioningly. “You good?”