“Oh, here we go.” Choo-Choo dropped back against the booth. Only then did Dani realize Kaneisha had finished her scan and was hunched over her laptop. She hadn’t seen where Booker had gone. “How long have you been holding that in, Dani? Is that really what we’re doing here?”
Her brain had ping-ponged from topic to topic so quickly that Dani had lost track of the conversation. Choo-Choo was pissed at her. The tracker. Tom. It felt like her brain was plugged into a faulty electrical outlet, the energy surging and dropping.
“I don’t know what we’re doing here,” she said, dropping the edge from her voice. “I haven’t had a clue what’s going on since we left Florida.”
Choo-Choo hadn’t quite crossed over to peace yet. “You didn’t have to come. I told you that you didn’t have to come with me. You could have stayed on the island and I would have just done my thing and been fine. Who knows? Maybe if you’d stayed behind, Tom could have come to visit you. You would have had the shack to yourself.”
“Shut up, Choo-Choo.” The edge flared up unexpectedly. “Stop acting like I’m orchestrating this. Or anything, for that matter. I haven’t had a fucking say in my life since Rasmund and you know it. All I do is react. All I do is try not to get killed or arrested or pinned down by any of the bullshit authority figures who don’t give a rat’s ass about what I want. At least you have a family to go to. You have the resources. You could leave Florida any time you wanted to. You could go back to your boats and your summer houses on Martha’s Vineyard. Let’s not forget that I was the one who came and got you. I looked for you. You never came for me.”
“I looked for you for six months and you know it.”
This old argument again. They had been dancing around this issue ever since Choo-Choo’s arrival on Redemption Key. It had been an ever present almost-fight that they minded and kept under control like a verbal patch of poison ivy. Neither wanted to dig into it. Neither wanted to do the work to extricate the insidious vine from the garden of their strange friendship. It mostly lay dormant, flaring up only occasionally when one of them was stressed or tired. It rarely gained any traction, the nature of their lives on Redemption Key a natural repellent.
But they were a long way from Redemption Key now.
Dani saw it in his eyes. He regretted the angry words as much as she did.
“What are we doing, Dani?”
She stared down at her plate and grabbed her sandwich. “Well first, I’m eating this because I’m starving, and my best friend special ordered it for me.” She took a big bite of the now cold sandwich. She spoke around her food. “Then we’re going to talk about the fact that we have trackers in our bodies. At least I do. You may too.”
“Why would they track us?” He held up his hand. “Sorry. Stupid question. But doesn’t it seem like overkill? I mean, you said there’s a tracker in your car.”
“I thought there was a tracker in my car. I figured they were tracking me and that seemed the easiest answer. I guess I need to up my parameters for villainy.”
“Yeah, okay. But that doesn’t answer why? Where did they think we were going to go? Or do? They could have killed us in that hospital. Why didn’t they? That question still wakes me up on the rare nights I’m able to sleep.”
“I’m guessing the Charbaneaux name had something to do with that. A hick like me could disappear and nobody would notice but the son of Conrad Charbaneaux? No, they couldn’t just wipe you off the map.”
“So, they tracked us? Why?”
She took another bite of the still delicious sandwich. He had a point. Why would the people behind Rasmund need to track them? They had sent Feds down on the regular to monitor and threaten them. Whoever they were, they had the power to keep her records out of criminal investigations. These people had real power, supervillain power. Surely they could use the world’s network of cameras to keep them in their sights on a tiny island in Florida.
“Maybe they thought we’d run?”
Choo-Choo shook his head. “And do what? Nobody would believe us even if we had something to tell anyone who cared enough to listen. Not that I’ve found anyone who fits that bill.”
Dani didn’t want to hear the sadness in those words. In this bizarre reality, she was luckier than Choo-Choo. She had nobody. No family, no old attachments. She was well and truly alone in this world except for him. Choo-Choo, on the other hand, had loads of people in his life. Scores of siblings and cousins. By all normal measures, he should have armies of people supporting him.
But she and Choo-Choo did not live in normal measures. After Rasmund, Choo-Choo’s family had judged him. Even before Rasmund, truth be told. He was the family fuck-up. She could still see it in their eyes even as they embraced him on his return.
Choo-Choo was alone in this world filled with people who shared his name.
That was a hell Dani could only imagine.
She reached across the table and covered his hand with her own.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you right away about seeing Tom.”
He waved off her apology. “I’m sorry I’m being such a dick about it. I do trust you. I do know that you’re not sneaking around with him. But there’s something weird between you two, something private and strange that I can’t really figure out. Maybe you don’t even know it’s there, but it’s there.”
“I know it’s there.” That confession lifted the weight off her heart. “I know I should be terrified at the very mention of Tom Booker. I very nearly shit a brick the first time I saw him on Redemption Key. But now? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just because he hasn’t killed me yet.”
“Your standards are low.” They laughed together.
“I’m all in with you, Choo-Choo. I know you said you’re not like me and you don’t want to completely cut off this part of your life.”
“Dani—”
“You don’t have to explain. I get it. At least, I get it as much as a trailer park orphan like me can get it. And I’m not going to lie. I imagine it doesn’t suck being able to jet around and have apartments in New York City. Under different circumstances, I could see us hanging out with your cousin Olivia and taking in the sights. I can see why you would you miss all of this.”
He scanned the less than glamorous diner. “I think I miss the idea of it more than I miss the reality of it. I miss the potential. I miss the part of me that used be at ease up here around these people. I guess that’s really what I miss. I miss not knowing what the world was really like. I miss being blissfully ignorant.”
“There’s no arguing that.” She leaned back against the booth with a sigh. The phone shifted against her leg and she yanked it from her pocket. “I’m also not going to miss this.”
Choo-Choo went still.
“Where did you get that?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I want to kill them both with my bare hands.
Cara bit back the words with difficulty. Standing in the doorway to the living room where only clutter and her unmolested purse remained, her ears still ringing from the endless prattle of Olivia Wren about quinoa and outdoor showers, Cara Hedrick feared this might be the moment she actually cracked. She feared that, in this instant, she would let loose the scream that wanted to roar out of her body like those condors the Wren girl had waxed rhapsodic about. Did condors scream? It felt to Cara like they should scream. She certainly wouldn’t make the mistake of asking that question, certain Olivia Wren could and would answer her with details beyond her ability to comprehend.
Where the fuck had those two gone?
The sensible thing to do was to ask the security guards posted at the door but they weren’t her team. Punching them in the throat would probably be frowned upon. Still, it was where she needed to start.
She threw open the front door.
“Where did they go?”
The muscular man beside the door jumped from his lean. “Ma’am? Who?”
Cara inhaled through her n
ose hard enough to create a whistle. “Do you know who is in this apartment? Do you know their names?”
“No ma’am.”
“Then what good would it do to tell you their names? All I want to know is who left this apartment and where did they go?”
His ruddy cheeks darkened. “Nobody came through here, ma’am. I haven’t left this spot.”
“Uh-huh. Wonderful.” Cara wondered exactly how much trouble she would get into if she just popped off a quick knife hand to the guard’s meaty throat. Just one, just to make her feel better. “Do you happen to know if there is another way out of this apartment?”
“You mean like a window?”
One quick strike to the windpipe. It called to her like a lover.
“No, honey, I mean like another door.”
“Oh, uh, no? I wasn’t told about another door.”
Cara nodded. “So probably nobody is guarding it, right?” He nodded along with her. “So probably there’s not much point in you guarding this door, is there? What with there being a whole other way to access the apartment, right?”
“I was ordered to stand guard, ma’am.”
“And you’re doing a wonderful job of it too.”
“Thank you, ma’am.”
Cara closed the door behind her, resting for just a moment to breathe down the rage. She was so close. They were so close to the trigger moment. This was not the time to let little snags unravel the entire tapestry.
Except that the person upon whom the entire plan rested had managed to stroll out of the apartment unnoticed by the security detail.
That’s what the trackers are for, she reminded herself.
“Hey,” Olivia Wren bounded into the room. “Where did everyone go?”
While Cara refused to eat any meat that came on the bone, in that moment she could see herself locking her jaws onto the next person who asked her a stupid question and ripping the flesh from those bones. She would bite and crush and snarl and tear until all of the stupidity in the world had been obliterated.
Of course, that wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t. Someone wise once said that the two most common elements on Earth were hydrogen and stupidity. There was no point in hoping to eradicate either of them. Cara allowed her molars to grind together almost to the point of pain to offset the need to either scream or bite. When she felt that tin-foil-on-fillings sensation begin, she breathed through the discomfort and smiled at the clueless woman beside her.
“Huh, I don’t know.” It sounded sunny. She could have dropped a truckload of profanity and it would have sounded sunnier than she felt but this sounded downright sunny. Unconcerned. Light-hearted. Not like someone with a countdown pounding inside her head. The trigger point was coming closer. This was no time to go off book.
“Oh hey,” the Wren girl said, oblivious to the apocalypse burning in Cara’s thoughts. “There’s a note. Damn it, Choo-Choo. He wrote on my expense receipt. I’m supposed to turn these in, and I always forget. You’d think that the Wren Foundation could take my word for it, but you know how accountants—”
“What does it say?” Cara spit out through a smile.
“It’s just some of my expenses from my last trip to Honduras. We were checking—”
“The note. What does the note say?” Cara thought they were close enough to Broadway that her current performance should get her nominated for a Tony.
“Oh, yeah. Um, just says they went out for a climb. A climb?” She squinted at the paper. “Man, his handwriting is crap. Is that climb? Oh no, it’s bite. I bet it’s bite. They went out to get something to eat.”
“Well that’s good,” Cara said, seeing tiny black spots on the edges of her vision as her blood pressure shot through her skull. “I bet they were hungry. That funeral went on a while.”
“Yeah,” Olivia tossed the note back onto the couch. “You hungry? I could make us something. Or better yet, order something.”
“Don’t you need that?”
Olivia blinked at her, not understanding. Cara nodded toward the couch.
“The expense form. Didn’t you say you needed that? Do you want to put it somewhere safe so you can turn it in?”
She wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “Nah, it’s fine there. I know where it is.”
“That seems like a wonderful system.”
Olivia laughed. “Oh my God, you sound like my mom’s secretary, Mrs. Pew. She’s always chiding me on my disorganized papers. She says it’s no way to run a foundation. So, what do you say? We can get some great fried chicken delivered.”
Cara wondered if the other woman could hear the bones in her neck creak as she shook her head. “No thanks. I really appreciate it, but I have work to do, namely finding that cousin of yours. We’re supposed to be heading back to Connecticut soon. I don’t suppose you have his cell phone number, do you?”
Her nose wrinkled again. Cara suspected this was Olivia’s ‘thinking face,’ the face she probably used to get out of any actual thinking. She was being hard on the girl, who wasn’t that much younger than Cara herself. And not exactly a slacker either. That foundation she headed made a major impact throughout the world but in areas that Cara would have struggled to care about. So yeah, Cara probably shouldn’t underestimate Ms. Wren’s perceptiveness. She resided safely within the circle of power. Besides, Cara could probably use her soon.
“I don’t think Choo-Choo has a phone,” Olivia said. “At least, that’s one of the many things everyone was bitching about when he disappeared last time.”
“When he went to Florida with Dani?” Cara asked, knowing the answer to the question but always open to more fully fleshing out the family’s take on it. Olivia nodded but added nothing. Circumspection seemed to be hereditary. “What did you think when he took off like that? Had you ever met Dani?”
“I wasn’t home when he left,” Olivia said obliquely. “I was in Iceland. I didn’t hear about it until I got back.”
“And Dani? When did you meet her?”
“Just now. In the car on the way to funeral.”
No offer of an opinion. Time to fish around for one. This could come in handy.
“What do you think of her?”
Despite Cara’s light tone, Olivia’s eyes flashed caution. Either Olivia didn’t like to gossip, or a family verdict had been passed and that impenetrable social barrier dropped around the subject. It took an awful lot of money to silence a hundred people on a particular topic. The Charbaneauxs and Wrens had that kind of money. Closing ranks came as naturally to them as polo and whatever other nonsense came easily to the obscenely rich.
Despite the ticking clock in her head, Cara acted like she had all the time in the world to wait for Olivia’s answer.
“I like her.”
Noncommittal. Gossip proof. Cara waited for any eye rolls or other signs, but none came. A Wren who shunned the spotlight as passionately as Olivia did would be hypersensitive to digging. Cara took another tack.
“She seems really down to Earth. Just between you and me, after everything I’d read about the senator’s brother, I was expecting more of a party girl.”
Olivia nodded, that caution draining from her expression. “That’s what I thought too. Everyone freaked out when he took off. He left in the middle of a party. Didn’t tell anyone, just took off in the middle of the evening. When his gramps said he was bringing him home with Dani, nobody really knew what to expect. She sure isn’t like his usual girlfriends.”
“I take it that’s a good thing? Are they dating?” Cara held up her hand to cut herself off. “Sorry, that’s gossip. I have no business asking you that. Forget I said it.”
“Oh, it’s okay,” Olivia rushed to put her at ease, as Cara predicted. “I don’t really know what their thing is. I don’t think anyone does. Choo-Choo has a wide variety of tastes, if you know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t.” She certainly did know but wanted to know what Olivia, and by associatio
n the family, thought. “Do you mean, like, sexually? Like bisexual? Are we still allowed to use that term? I don’t want to offend anyone.”
Olivia laughed. “Choo-Choo is pretty hard to offend. Pretty hard to define too.”
“I notice you’re the only one besides Dani who calls him Choo-Choo. Everyone else calls him Sin or Sinclair.”
She shrugged. “He hates that name. He likes being called Choo-Choo so that’s what I call him. He’s gone by that since middle school. One of his many scandals.”
“You two are close.”
Another shrug. “We’re both weirdos in our own families. He never dragged me into the front of any family photos, I never insisted he remain sober or dignified. When there are this many people around you who all share your name, allies can be surprisingly rare.”
Cara felt the edges of Olivia’s safety margin. The girl did not like sharing personal information. Any more questions, however casual, would cause her guard to go up and Cara couldn’t have that, not right now.
“Believe me, I know how important it is to have someone you can really trust. I’m the youngest of six. NATO has nothing on sibling warfare.” In fact, Cara had one younger brother who thought she worked in finance and whom she only saw every other Christmas. The lie did its job, priming Olivia for the next step.
“I may have a big favor to ask of you, Olivia. It may not come to it but if it does, I’m really hoping you’ll be the one who can help me.” Olivia nodded, the fear of inconvenience eclipsing the caution of privacy. “I’ve got to go find Sinclair Charbaneaux. My job is to keep his sister – and my employer – safe and that means I have to tighten the reins on all stray siblings until I get the all-clear from my team.”
“I don’t know where he went.”
“I know. I know. That’s not the problem. We should be able to track him down. I mean, he probably didn’t go far, right? This is New York City. There’s good food everywhere.”
“What do you need me to do?” Like a true introvert, Olivia homed in on the favor.
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