She turned for the shore at 1,400 feet altitude.
As we came abreast of the Double Scotch, I studied the yacht through my binoculars. I was glad to see the swim platform shown on the photos still attached.
I scanned the yacht. Graciela lay on a sun lounge in a red bikini, or at least a red bikini bottom. I nudged Snoop with my elbow. “It’s Graciela. She’s in the red bikini she bought at the Palace gift shop.”
“Too bad she’s not topless. We could get some shots for the tabloids.”
I handed him the binoculars. “You need glasses, Snoop. She is topless.”
Marie elbowed me in the ribs. Hard.
###
By noon, Marie had returned us to their helicopter base in Coral Gables. I tried to call Bob, but it went straight to voicemail. I left a message, then remembered he had a news conference scheduled for noon. I texted him: We saw Gracie sunbathing on Vidali’s boat. He has at least four crewmen aboard and maybe the gunmen that came to my office. Can I call the cops now? Or maybe the Coast Guard?
We jumped in my Avanti and headed toward Port City. Forty-five minutes later, my phone signaled a text. Since I was driving 65 mph on I-95, the prudent thing was to hand the phone to Snoop. “Read this to me.”
He took the phone. “It’s from Bob. It says, ‘Don’t do anything yet. Meet me in my hotel room ASAP.’ What are we gonna do?”
“Meet the client in his hotel room ASAP, of course.”
Chapter 36
Bob had given me a keycard to his suite a few days before. Snoop and I made ourselves at home until he got there. I ordered room service hamburgers and iced tea for three. I brewed a pot of coffee in the suite’s kitchen while we waited.
Bob walked in a few minutes later holding a section of newspaper.
I poured three coffees. “I ordered burgers and iced tea for us. We haven’t had lunch and I figured you’d be hungry too.”
“Thanks, Eighty-Eight. I hope the burgers are good, ’cause this has been a pretty shitty day so far.”
“Wanna cry on my shoulder?”
Bob tossed a section of the Port City Press-Journal to me. “Front page article of the Lifestyle section. The headline says Super Bowl Wives, Sweethearts Have Tough Week.”
I opened it and saw Renate Crowell’s byline. “That reporter came to see me at my office yesterday.”
“You? She came to see you?”
“She’s sort of a friend.”
Bob jumped to his feet. “It says ‘unnamed sources close to the Jets quarterback’ have hinted that Gracie is missing. ‘Unnamed sources’? How the hell could you do that to me? She’s ‘sort of a friend’? I thought you were my friend, for crissakes. How could you tell a goddamn reporter that Gracie is gone? You using some sleazy newspaper to pressure me to call the cops?”
Snoop stepped in front of Bob. From the look on his face, he intended to defend me from a professional athlete who was twenty years younger, half a head taller, and fifty pounds heavier. Go Snoop.
I put a hand on my mentor’s arm. “I can handle this, Snoop. Bob and I go back all the way to grade school.”
Snoop jerked his arm free. “Guy’s got no right to talk to you like that. I don’t care how long he’s known you.” He moved away.
I turned to Bob. “It wasn’t me.”
Bob took a step back. His temperature dropped a couple of degrees. “Whaddya mean?”
“I wasn’t the unnamed source. I told you that your secrets were safe with me, and they are. Renate knew you and I are friends. Hell, everybody knows that. Someone told her about our breakfast Sunday morning in the coffee shop. Again, no big secret. She came to my office yesterday to check out a rumor about Graciela not attending any Super Bowl events for the last few days. She asked me for a comment. I said I didn’t know anything about Gracie being missing. She asked me about Gracie’s heroin use, and about her stint in rehab. Told her I didn’t know anything about that and didn’t care. Wasn’t my business, nor hers.”
Bob took the newspaper back. “The article didn’t say anything about Gracie using drugs or going to rehab.”
“I don’t know where Renate found out about that, but she knew, or thought she did. I couldn’t ask her about her sources without clueing her in that the rumors were true. She wouldn’t tell me if I did ask. She also knew that Snoop and I had seen the hotel security videos of Vidali passing the envelope and of Gracie leaving the hotel. That means that her source was Wally, the hotel security guard who minds the monitors.”
“Do we want to complain to the hotel about him?”
“Nah. Forget it. Water under the bridge.”
“Okay. Why didn’t the reporter say something about the envelope?”
“I told Renate that Gracie’s agent and her attorney were sharks when it came to protecting her reputation. No one knows what was in the envelope. Apparently, I scared her off a little bit. But, buddy, you don’t know how hard it is to scare her; she’s a tough, tough reporter.”
“Well the sports reporters at the press conference had seen the article. They asked me where Gracie was. They blindsided me.”
“Oh shit. What did you tell them?”
“I told them she was visiting a friend.”
“How did that sit with them?”
“They asked me who the friend was.” Bob smiled. “I told them I would be happy to answer their questions about football, but that Gracie’s personal life and my own were private.”
“Nice catch,” said Snoop. “Hey, sorry about a while ago, Bob. I wasn’t really gonna hit you.”
Bob grinned. “Whew. I was worried.” He turned to me. “Now tell me about finding Gracie,” he said.
I told him how we found the Double Scotch. “She was five miles off Turkey Point in the middle of Biscayne Bay, anchored in ten feet of water. That whole bay is in Biscayne National Park, but this is no job for park rangers. The only way to board the boat is at sea. Actually, at over a hundred feet long, it qualifies as a ship. The ship has a regular crew of six and Vidali and his two bodyguards could be on board. Probably at least a few of the crew will be armed. That would make as many as nine guns if all of them are armed. We need the Coast Guard for firepower. And—since she’s been abducted—the FBI.”
Bob walked to the sliding glass doors and looked out at Seeti Bay. “We can’t do that, Eighty-Eight.”
I’d had enough of Bob’s BS. “Listen, you jerk. The most dangerous man in New Jersey kidnapped your fiancée. I’ll bet a steak dinner against a chocolate bar that Vidali plans to text you tomorrow afternoon on Gracie’s phone. He’ll include a picture of Gracie holding the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper to prove she’s alive. The text will demand that you lose the game or at least shave the points so this bastard wins one hundred million dollars. Do you get that? One hundred million dollars. He’s killed people for a lot less than that. That’s how serious he is. Now do you think he means business?”
Bob stood like a statue. No, more like a scarecrow. Upright, but not rigid. He turned to face me, then cut his eyes to Snoop. He looked back at me and his eyes widened. He licked his lips, but didn’t speak.
“Snoop, will you give us the room?”
Snoop picked up his cup. “I’ll take my coffee into the bedroom. I wanna catch the news.” He closed the bedroom door after him.
Bob sat down like a deflated balloon. He looked at the floor.
I sat. “Okay, spit it out.”
Bob’s eyes filled with tears. “I have a bet on the game.”
“What the hell? You bet on your own team?”
He shrugged, nodded without looking me in the eye.
“Bob, if that gets out, your career is in the ash can. You know that, don’t you?”
He nodded. A tear spilled from one eye. He still looked at the floor.
I patted his shoulder. “Okay, Bob, we’ll figure something out. Tell me about it.”
Tears flowed down both cheeks. “Last September, we played the Chargers in San Diego in a Thursday
night game.” He took a deep breath. “It was week three of the season. The next week was a bye week, so the team had the weekend off. I called Gracie to meet me in Las Vegas. We had a great time. Maybe we drank a little too much.” He looked at me. “We walked through the sports book at the casino. I saw a board with the Super Bowl odds for all thirty-two teams.”
“If anyone in the sports book had recognized you, you would have been in big trouble.”
He nodded. “It was late at night—or early in the morning, depending on how you look at it. The place was mostly deserted, or I would never have gone in there. That, and the fact that Gracie and I had a second bottle of wine and a few after-dinner liqueurs.” His gaze dropped to the floor again. “To tell the God’s honest truth, Eighty-Eight, I was knee-walking drunk.” He raised his face. “You know I almost never do that. We’d lost our first three games. The odds on the Jets to win the Super Bowl were a hundred to one. Hell, the odds on us making the playoffs were three to one. But I knew those three losses were a fluke. We were a better team than the score showed. Anyway,” he looked back at the floor. “I put ten thousand dollars on the Jets to win the Super Bowl.”
I jumped to my feet. “I can’t believe this, Bob. I hear it, but I can’t believe it.” I grabbed his lapels. I started to jerk him to his feet to slap some sense into him. Then I realized it was too late for that. I dropped his lapels and walked across the room. I turned around to look at him from a safe distance. Not safe for me, but safe for him; I felt like clocking the guy. He was bigger, but I was tougher. “You’ve risked a fifty-million dollar a year career for a lousy ten thousand dollar bet. You stand to make half a billion dollars over your whole career. A half billion. And you gambled ten thousand. What the hell were you thinking?”
His voice showed a little more animation. “I told you I was drunk, Eighty-Eight.”
“You say that like it’s an excuse.” I looked at the ceiling. “Somebody shoot me right now.”
He slammed his chair arm with a fist. “All right, goddammit. Enough. I can’t change the past, and I can’t afford to have the bet exposed or they’ll banish me from football. I’m trapped.”
I saw the desperation in his eyes. “It’s fourth and long, Eighty-Eight, and I don’t know what play to call.”
I held up a hand for silence. “I’ll call the play this time. Where is the ticket now?”
“In the hotel safe in my closet.”
“Get it.”
“Wait here.” Bob knocked twice on the bedroom door and went in. A minute later, he returned. He handed me the ticket. “Here it is.”
I looked at the piece of paper. So small, so fragile, so fatal to Bob’s career if it surfaced. “For one thing, Bob, we can throw away the ticket, kiss the ten thousand dollars goodbye. Pretend it never happened; it’s a small loss.”
“You don’t know anything about sports betting, do you?”
“I had a sheltered life. Snoop is my expert there. Can I have him join us?”
Bob shrugged and walked back to the bedroom door. He opened it. “Snoop, you wanna come in?”
Snoop carried his empty cup to the kitchen and refilled it. “What’s happening?”
Just then our lunch arrived. We sat around the dining room table and waited until the server left.
I held up the betting ticket, glanced at Bob, and raised my eyebrows.
He took the ticket and passed it to Snoop. “Last September, when the odds were a hundred to one, I bet on the Jets to win the Super Bowl.”
Snoop read the ticket. “Now you wish you hadn’t, right? On account of you could get banned from football for life for gambling.”
Bob nodded. “Chuck said I could destroy the ticket and pretend the bet never happened.” He glanced at me. “Tell Eighty-Eight why that would be a bad idea.”
Snoop grinned. “Chuck, the ticket is worth maybe a half-million dollars right now, before the game is even played.”
“How so?”
“The casino will buy back any bet if the odds change. You don’t have to wait for the game, when the ticket will either be worth a million bucks or nothing.”
I nodded. “I get it. There’s a market value for the ticket before the game.”
Bob said, “Right. But I don’t dare sell the ticket, and I sure as hell can’t wait and collect the money after we win. But it doesn’t seem right to just let a half million dollars go down the toilet.”
“You could anonymously donate the ticket to charity.”
“Would a charity take gambling proceeds as a donation? They might have a problem with that.”
“I know one that will take the ticket and sell it before the game starts. Would you like me to arrange it?”
Bob’s whole demeanor changed. He seemed to get bigger even as he sat at the table. “You mean that’s all I do is to get rid of this stupid ticket? I could give it away?”
I nodded. “Yep. Thank goodness you can afford the loss.”
Bob took the ticket from Snoop’s hand and placed it in mine. “Who would accept a donated gambling ticket, Eighty-Eight?”
“The Port City Rescue Mission might take it. I know the preacher that runs it. Let me give him a call.” I called the number and put the phone on speaker.
“Rescue Mission, Brother Jim here.”
“Jim, it’s Chuck McCrary. I have you on speaker phone.”
“Hey, Chuck. How’s it going?”
“Fine, thanks, Jim. I have a, uh, unique item to donate to the mission.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a sports betting ticket from a Las Vegas Casino.”
“Is it a winning ticket?”
“Not yet. The ticket is for the Jets to win the Super Bowl. It’s worth a million dollars if the Jets win.”
“What if they lose?”
“It’ll be worthless. But right now, whoever holds the ticket can sell it back to the casino for about a half-million dollars. Will the mission take money from gambling?”
“Chuck, our mission would take money from the devil himself. And we’d put it to good use. How did you come to have this ticket? I didn’t take you for a gambling man.”
“It’s not my ticket, Jim. It belongs to someone who bought it months ago. Now that person wants to donate it to a worthy cause. I told them your rescue mission was worthy.”
“Thanks, Chuck. We do our best.”
“Someone you trust would have to fly to Vegas tomorrow with the ticket to cash it in. The guy who owns the ticket will pay for the flight. You got anybody you’d trust with a half million dollars?”
“I’d trust you, Chuck.”
“Thanks, but I’m tied up until after the Super Bowl. You got someone else?”
“Sure. I know several ministers, priests, and rabbis. I’m sure one of them will fly it out there for me. Where is the ticket now?”
In five minutes I had used my credit card to arrange tickets to Las Vegas at the will call at the Port City airport. I wrapped the betting ticket in a sheet of hotel stationery. No one could hold it to the light and read it through the envelope. I stuck it in a hotel envelope and wrote “Reverend Jim Holmes, Port City Rescue Mission” on it. “Snoop, take this to the concierge desk and wait for Jim. He’s on the way right now.”
Snoop grinned and left the room.
Bob turned to me with a contented smile. “You lifted a big weight off my shoulders, Eighty-Eight.”
“That’s why I make the big bucks, Bob.”
Bob drank some iced tea. “Now you can call the cops.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, Bob. A Coast Guard cutter would be the normal hostage rescue craft if the target were on the high seas. Cutters carry a crew of fifteen to twenty. But Biscayne Bay is less than ten feet deep on average. A cutter draws nine or ten feet, too deep to operate in the bay. The Coast Guard would approach the Double Scotch in RBM’s.”
Bob set down his burger and grabbed some French fries. “What’s an RBM?”
“Response boat, medium. T
hey draw a little over three feet of water. They’re forty-five feet long. They cruise at thirty knots and sprint up to forty knots. The Double Scotch couldn’t outrun them. RBMs carry a crew of four, but they can carry up to a dozen men. They would need two of them for a strike force.”
“How come you know so much about the Coast Guard, Eighty-Eight?”
“I’m a boat nut. Back to the subject at hand, if the crew on the Double Scotch sees the Coast Guard galloping to the rescue, then we could have a hostage situation. Gracie could be injured or killed. I don’t want to take that chance.”
“What choice do we have?” Bob washed the fries down with iced tea.
“I’m gonna snatch Gracie off the Double Scotch without them knowing.”
“How?”
“Stealth, which means I have to operate without the Coast Guard. After I have Gracie safe, I’ll sic the Coast Guard on the Double Scotch to arrest the crew for kidnapping.”
“Against a half a dozen guns?”
Chapter 37
By 5:30 the skyscrapers in downtown Port City cast long shadows across the marina. Snoop and I ran the pre-cruise checklist on the Gator Raider Too. It would have been a beautiful day to watch the sunset under other circumstances. I glanced at the sun peeking between the buildings and stopped stowing gear for a moment. “Did you call Janet, Snoop?”
His voice came from the cabin. “Yeah. I told her I’d be on this case all night.”
“I’m surprised Janet would let you come on a rescue mission, Snoop. I would’ve bet she wouldn’t be okay with that.”
Snoop carried two bottles of Diet Dr Pepper from the cabin. He handed me one. “I didn’t say it was a rescue mission.”
“You’ve been married for what, twenty-five years?”
“Twenty-seven.”
“You have two daughters.”
“Yeah. One in college and one in high school.”
“Janet made you quit the Port City Police. She was worried you’d get shot and not be there for your kids.”
He nodded. “Among other reasons.”
“And the odds are pretty high that you could get shot tonight if things go south.”
Quarterback Trap (A Carlos McCrary novel Book 3) Page 12