Finding Redemption

by Desiree Holt

  “Damn it, Josh. I know I sound like a broken record, but it would help a lot if we just had some idea who would do this, and why we haven’t heard anything.” Her voice shook with repressed fear, and she gnawed on a fingernail.

  “Lisa,” he began.

  A tear carved a track on one cheek. “I don’t believe he’s dead, Josh. I just know I’d feel it if he were.”

  “Honey, we have to be prepared for anything. You know that.” He pushed himself out of the chair. “But I’m with you. I have this odd feeling Jamie’s still alive. Now. How about a cup of tea?”

  “How about a glass of wine?” she countered. At the look on his face, she added, “Don’t worry. I’m not turning into an alcoholic.” She forced a smile. “One glass, all right?”

  “Okay. But just one.” He found an open bottle of chardonnay in the refrigerator, snagged two glasses from the cupboard, and filled them with the golden liquid. He handed one to Lisa and grinned. “Try not to break this one.”

  She sipped at it, watching him focus on her. “What?”

  “You ate almost nothing at lunch,” he pointed out. “Why don’t I fix us some steaks for dinner, with baked potatoes?”

  She waved his suggestion away. “I can hardly choke food down. I keep wondering if Jamie’s getting enough to eat. How he’s being treated. If he thinks we’ve forgotten about him.”

  Josh put down his wine, took Lisa’s glass, set it on the counter, and put his hands on her shoulders. “You won’t do Jamie any good if you make yourself sick. When we find him—when, not if—he’ll need you, and you’ll have to be in good shape.”

  She shrugged off his touch. “I know I sound like a broken record, but I’m convinced we’re missing something. This has to do with Charles in some way. I’m sure of it. I just don’t know what. Damn that man to hell, anyway. And damn me for being so stupid as to marry him.”

  “If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have Jamie,” Josh pointed out.

  Jamie. The only clean thing to come out of the abomination that her life as Mrs. Charles Mallory had turned into.

  She saw the worry lines etched into Josh’s face. He’d been her rock and strength through all of this. If trying to eat would ease his mind, it was a small enough thing to do.

  “Okay. Steak it is.” She gave him a tight smile. “But your precious Ethan Caine better not be yanking my chain. It doesn’t have many links left.”

  Chapter Four

  The commuter flight from Tampa to Key West took ninety minutes, flying in what Ethan described as a flying paper towel tube. The small plane shimmied and shuddered as it droned through the air, and the cramped condition of the cabin did nothing to increase anyone’s comfort.

  His phony credentials had been perfect enough to get him through security at Tampa International Airport. With his history both at Guardian and in black ops, if he flew as Ethan Caine, the shooters would be lining up. He managed to get a window seat and hunched himself into the small space allotted. With a battered straw Panama tipped down to cover his face, he closed his eyes and let his mind ramble.

  He’d taken the time to contact both Josh and Nick before he left. Both calls had been brief. “I’ll be gone for a week.”

  “What?” Josh raised his voice. “You’re going away now? Are you kidding me?”

  “When I come back, I’ll tell you if I can help or not.”

  “What am I supposed to tell Lisa? She’s already at the edge of every nerve.”

  “Whatever you need to.” He’d hung up on Josh’s angry voice.

  It couldn’t be helped. He needed some answers, and if he couldn’t get them, he couldn’t do what was being asked of him. He might have been out of the black ops game for a while, but you never forgot how to prepare. Considering the disaster his last mission had been, the clusterfuck of all time, he wanted every base covered this time. And he knew only one place to get what he needed.

  “I’m going to assume this trip is necessary,” Nick Vanetta told him. “We’re running out of time here.”

  “So everyone keeps reminding me. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be doing it. There’s a man I’ve known since I left Guardian. We were part of the same, uh, team for a long while. He has access to every black area in the universe, and he’s too smart to answer questions over the phone. He makes his home in the Keys so that’s where I’m going.”

  Ethan had spent a long night thinking about his own past, questioning his abilities after that last disaster and whether he could pull himself together enough to do what was being asked of him. But if this visit didn’t pan out, he had nothing to offer Lisa Mallory.

  He hadn’t seen Dino Brancuzzi since he’d turned his back on black ops. They had worked some missions together, nasty little jobs that were crucial to the country’s safety and security but for which the government needed plausible deniability, and become good friends. Ethan might have removed himself completely from the world he’d lived in for so long, but Dino still kept his fingers in the pie. He still ran the same deep water fishing charter service out of Key West, but he still did contract work for the government as well as some multinational corporations.

  So Blackwater Charters—a chuckle, since Blackwater was the code name for the first job they’d done together—mixed covert ops with fishing for marlin. Others he’d worked with in some of his ops also carried their particular skills and training into civilian life, with businesses like a helicopter service, a gun club, and deepwater salvage. Like Dino, they often did off-the-book jobs for Uncle Sam.

  Ethan could have reached out to any of them, but he and Dino had always been the closest. They’d been together the longest and more than the others, Dino had contacts in every dark corner of the world. If it happened, he either knew about it or could find out about it. Whatever he needed, if Dino could do it, he would.

  The thought of dipping his toes in that water again made Ethan’s stomach clench. He still wrestled with too many nightmares. Still saw the faces of the dead too often. But Josh was a good friend, and Ethan always took care of his friends. And no matter what he thought of Josh’s sister, with her son missing now for three months, she had to be caught in a living hell. If anyone could find out what he needed to know, Dino would be the one.

  The sun blazed white fire when the plane landed in Key West. Ethan pulled his sunglasses from the pocket of his rumpled shirt and slid them on before stepping out onto the tarmac, protecting his eyes from the glare. The heavy, humid air made his shirt stick to his body in just the few minutes it took to walk to the terminal. Well, what did he expect at the southernmost tip of the United States? Polar bears?

  A few years back, the terminal building had undergone some renovations and now was more eye-catching for the tourists. Ethan, however, missed the chipped floors and cracks in the glass doors before the city council decided to spruce the place up.

  He pushed through the tiny mobs of people with pale skin and Technicolor outfits. In the curve of the driveway outside the building, jaded taxi drivers waited outside their vehicles, laughing and joking, for the next wave of passengers.

  The driver at the head of the line was leaning his arms on the roof of his car, watching the doors with an avaricious gaze. When he spotted Ethan, his Chamber of Commerce smile broke out, showing gleaming white teeth. “Where you goin’? I’m the best ride on the island.”

  “As long as you don’t kill me getting there. You know Pelican Marina?”

  “Oh, sure, oh, sure.” He bobbed his head. “You fishin’?”

  “You could say that.” Ethan threw his carryall into the cab and folded himself into the back seat. “Let’s do it.”

  He hadn’t been in Key West in years, but the old-fashioned cottages, brightly colored flowers, and turquoise water of the Atlantic Ocean brought back every memory. Real estate titles dated back to the King of Spain, and the price of a tiny patch of land was indeed a king’s ransom. Fishing, water sports, and the legend of Ernest Hemingway, as well as the infamous Duval Crawl—a pub-c
rawl down the main street—drew tourists by the thousands. The abundance of tourists had always provided good cover for his activities, allowing him to blend invisibly into the crowd.

  And the Keys were an ideal jumping off spot to head out into the Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico if you had work to do that didn’t bear media attention. The confluence of the two bodies of water had long provided access for drug smugglers and later on for terrorists.

  That, however, was a long time ago for him. Except the kidnapping of Jamie Mallory, which poked at him like a hot iron, might just thrust him right back into the life he’d turned his back on.

  As he drove, the driver kept up a running commentary of activities and events. Ethan pulled his hat down again and wished the man would shut up with the travelogue. He wasn’t here for a vacation, and he sure didn’t expect to enjoy himself.

  The cab stopped in a gravel parking lot next to an arched sign held up by two metal pelicans. A long wooden dock stretched out into the water with colorful boats of all types bobbing in their slips on either side. Ethan’s nose caught the familiar tangy scent of salt water, his ears the discordant symphony of the seagulls and pelicans wheeling and screeching overhead.

  He hauled himself and his bag out of the back seat and thrust several bills at the driver.

  “Have a good time, man.” The driver grinned.

  “That’ll be a miracle,” Ethan muttered and trudged through the archway toward a small wooden building on the right. The faded sign over the door said Blackwater Charters. An innocuous name for a not-so-innocent business.

  He opened the door and stepped into a small office full of artic air. Sitting in a worn leather chair, feet up on the desk, a telephone to his ear was a man tanned to a deep olive with his salt-and-pepper hair tied back in a ponytail and a gold stud gleaming in one ear. He took one look at Ethan and sat up, dropping his feet from the desk.

  “I’ll have to call you back,” he said into the phone and hung up. “Damnation! Ethan Caine in the flesh.”

  “I think that’s the ‘too, too, too solid flesh’,” Caine quoted, “although I’m not sure how solid mine is anymore. How the fucking hell are you, Dino?”

  Brancuzzi stood and took the hand Ethan held out. “Shocked to see a walking ghost is how I am.” He studied Ethan. “How are you doing?”

  Dino knew every detail of his last op and what had happened. Ethan had come here to hide when he’d walked away and spent a week drunk at Dino’s house.

  “Same as ever.”

  “I was hoping you’d say better than ever.”

  “One thing at a time.”

  Barely moving his eyes, Ethan took in each familiar detail of the office. A cracked leather couch and two plastic chairs were the only pieces of furniture other than the desk and chair. It looked like the typical, slightly shop-worn charter office, a place where people on a budget could hire a boat and fish among the rich and beautiful. But the desk held a sophisticated computer setup and a fancy array of communications equipment. Ethan suspected if his friend ran no legitimate charters at all, he’d still have no money worries. His boat went out and came back every day, he blended in with the locals, and no one paid attention.

  Ethan dropped his bag on the floor and sat in one of the plastic chairs. He frowned when it rocked slightly. “Nice furniture you’ve got.”

  Dino shrugged. “My clients don’t require special interior decoration.” He sat back down, propped his feet on the desk, and stared at the man in front of him. “I never thought I’d see your ugly face again.”

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t think you would either. But here I am.” Ethan fought a grin. He knew the casual pose his friend affected was so much camouflage.

  There wasn’t a casual bone in Dino Brancuzzi’s body. Every nerve would be on alert, every muscle tightly coiled should sudden movement be necessary. The grin on his face didn’t quite reach his watchful, wary eyes.

  “I won’t ask what you’ve been doing, because I know the answer’s nothing.” Dino narrowed his eyes. “Not a whisper about you in all this time.”

  “Good. I’m tired of being whispered about. But I can’t say the same for you, Slick.”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear. You should know that.” Dino studied Ethan’s face. “So what brings you to sunny Key West?”

  Ethan narrowed his gaze at Dino. “I think I need your help.”

  And that was no lie. If anyone was plugged into every whisper or source in the underbelly of the world, it was Dino Brancuzzi. More than anyone else, he could find where Jamie was and hopefully still alive.

  Dino’s eyebrows climbed up through his hairline, but he said nothing, just waited for Ethan to continue.

  “Let me tell you a story.” Shifting in the uncomfortable chair, Ethan gave him every detail of the Lisa Mallory situation, from her marriage to the kidnapping of her son.

  Dino made no comment until the narrative was finished, then he leaned forward on the desk. “You’re going to find the son.” A statement, not a question.

  Ethan heaved a sigh. “Yeah, well, Mrs. Mallory and I will never be social chums, but you know how I feel about kids. And it’s damned interesting that, since the snatch, there hasn’t been even one hint of what happened to him.”

  Dino nodded. “Kidnappers either return the goods or dump the body. If the package is dead, they can’t get rid of it fast enough. So we assume the kid’s alive?”

  “Yeah. At least we hope he is.”

  “And you want me to sniff around,” Dino guessed.

  “What I want—need—is help with things I can’t get my hands on any longer, but I figure you can.” A corner of his mouth turned up. “Maybe from some of your fishing buddies.”

  “Poke into some corners, you mean.”

  “Only if you’re comfortable with this.” Ethan lifted his hat and raked his fingers through his hair. “Truth to tell, my friend, there’s no one else I would trust in this situation.”

  Dino nodded. “I hear you. What’s your gut telling you?”

  “That this still has something to do with the husband. A primo asshole.”

  Dino nodded. “I agree. This didn’t just come out of nowhere. And if it was an enemy getting revenge, against who? The wife? For money? They got it. If they don’t return the kid, there’s usually a body. This time you have nothing. So. A puzzle.” He began rolling a pencil between his fingers. “You said the IRS yanked all his records?”

  “Uh huh.” Ethan leaned forward. “I could file an Open Records Request with them, but I know you and Uncle have a little, shall we say, ongoing relationship, so I’d say you have a better chance of getting the stuff ASAP. Besides, I want info Uncle can’t get his hands on. The stuff Mallory hid about his real business.”

  “Gotcha.” Dino nodded. “I’ll make a call. See if I can get some of what you need emailed to me, maybe even today. Depends on where it comes from.”

  “One other thing. Guardian is helping me with this, keeping it off the books, of course. Nick Vanetta is my point man. I’d like it if you and he could put the details together. You each bring different things to the table.”

  Dino hiked a brow but nodded. “Of course. We’ll make it work.”

  “Okay.” Ethan levered himself out of the rickety chair and picked up his bag. “I’ll go find a room someplace and let you know where I am.”

  “The town is packed with conventions,” Dino protested. “You can’t get a room at any price. I’ve got an extra bed at my place you can use. Nothing fancy,” he added, “but at least it’s clean and you can make yourself invisible if you want.”

  “Thanks. I appreciate that.”

  “Come on. Today’s quiet, so let me run you over to the house. Then I’ll come back here and see what I can dig up.”

  ****

  “He did what?” Lisa Mallory stood in front of her brother, hands fisted on her hips, fighting the rage gathering inside her.

  “He left a message that he’d be gone for a week and he�
�d call when he got back.”

  “I knew it. I just knew it.” Lisa paced back and forth. “The man is just an ass. I’m sorry, Josh. I know he’s your friend, but I’m in the biggest crisis of my life and he takes off someplace? Why did I expect anything else?”

  Josh held out his hands in front of him, palms outward. “Hold on. I didn’t say that.” He blew out a breath. “My guess is he’s gone to make contact with some people from his…previous occupation. See what he can find out.”

  “Then why didn’t he say so?” She pounded a fist against her thigh. “Doesn’t he know I’m losing it here? What kind of man just takes off like that and leaves me twisting in the wind?”

  “Lisa, hold onto this thought. If he was going to turn you down or walk away, he would have done so already.”

  She clenched her fists, trying to still the anger that bubbled through her system, the only emotion keeping her fear in check. Ethan Caine just stuck in her craw, a man whose disdain for her had been evident at their uncomfortable lunch. She didn’t trust him the way Josh did, but she had no place else to turn. He knew it, and that left her at his mercy. She hated it.

  “Every day we waste is another day Jamie’s slipping away from me.” She chewed on a thumbnail, a bad habit she’d picked up over the past few months.

  “Sit.” Josh put his hands on her shoulders and gently forced her into the chair behind her. “Just…sit. Let me get you some tea. No wine,” he added when she opened her mouth to speak. “You need to lay off the wine before you become an alcoholic. Tea.”

  “Do you really think he’s trying to find out something?” In her marriage to Charles, she’d felt like such a victim. She was determined not to be at anyone’s mercy again, including the unpredictable Ethan Caine’s.

  “Yes. I do. He said one week, and I guarantee it won’t be longer than that. Maybe less. Lisa, Ethan knows what he’s doing. How to research an op and plan it. He won’t do anything until he’s gathered all the information he can.”