“I need more of an explanation than that!” But he’d hung up.
For God’s sake, for once, just once, couldn’t Dave let me finish a goddamn sentence before he hung up on me? He’d been doing that all our lives.
All our lives. I couldn’t stand him most of the time, but I had a framed picture on my wall of a grinning five-year-old Dave holding newborn me, cradling me on his lap with an unusual amount of care for a boy that age. And then there’d been that time my first boyfriend broke up with me, right before junior prom. I’d hoped he’d actually go to it with me, as a couple. Instead he went with Sally Franklin and pretended he didn’t know me.
Dave had picked me up early when I didn’t have the guts to call our parents, taken me out for ice cream, and then sneaked me a drink out of Dad’s liquor cabinet. He hadn’t even complained when I threw up the Scotch and the ice cream all over the bathroom floor and left it for him to clean up.
He actually had cleaned it, since if the maid had done it, she’d have told Mom and Dad. That was probably the only time Dave had ever held a sponge, come to think of it.
Fine. He could be a douchebag, but he was still my brother. Whatever the hell he had going on, I’d show up.
I wasn’t ruling out a pod-person having taken his place, though.
I threw on the first clothes I could find, some jeans and a t-shirt and an old hoodie. I had to rummage for clean socks, which gave me time to run over our conversation in my head for the third time.
My brain kept snagging on how he claimed not to have told Alec about my expulsion.
Why would he lie? For that matter, why would Alec lie?
One of them had lied. If it was Alec, then that prompted another and kind of more disturbing question: How had Alec known? And if he had known, why hadn’t he simply admitted it, instead of making up the weird story about Dave telling him?
And if Dave hadn’t told him, and Alec had been lying to me, then I really didn’t have the right to be quite this angry with my brother.
Who wanted Alec to come with me, for unspecified reasons that I knew, at least, one hundred percent had nothing to do with moving fucking furniture.
Alec. My chest clenched, a miserable icy feeling taking over. I’d known he wasn’t totally on the up-and-up, and I’d ignored it, as usual. He knew about wine and how to tie a bow tie, but claimed to be an unemployed construction worker.
And okay, that sounded snobby as hell, but still. It didn’t fit.
For fuck’s sake, he hadn’t told me his last name until he’d needed to give it to my dad when I tried to introduce him. I knew he had a sister, with kids. I knew he had parents—and what a shock, considering he was a mammal and couldn’t have hatched out of an egg, after all.
He’d accosted me in a park and somehow I’d ended up falling for him without knowing a fucking thing about him.
Because no matter how often I told myself I deserved better, somewhere down deep—and not even down that deep, because it sure surfaced and fucked with me often enough—I didn’t believe it.
That sensation of my internal organs freezing solid intensified. Last night had been one of the best of my life. I knew Alec had felt the same. And what could he possibly want from me? I’d swear he didn’t give a fuck about my money, or my family’s money.
God, too much at once, too much, and I had that whirring, numb-faced feeling like everything was going too fast and I couldn’t focus.
I snatched up my phone and fired off a text to Alec:
Going to the factory to see Dave. Called me all worked up. He didn’t tell you about me getting kicked out. Why did you lie? Call me ASAP.
I thought of calling my dad to see if he knew whether Dave had had a psychotic break, but trying to explain the conversation I’d just had to my father made me want to bash my head against the wall until my brains leaked out—the probable result of talking to Dad about this, anyway. I set the phone down again and grabbed the socks I’d finally unearthed from under a pile of sort-of clean t-shirts.
Shoes. What’d I done with them? By the door, shit, of course. I snatched up my keys and wallet, slammed out of the condo, and clattered down the stairs.
The roads were pretty empty; apparently there weren’t any big events going on this weekend.
So I’d already made it halfway along Shelburne Point before I realized I’d left my phone on my bed, right where I’d tossed it after texting Alec.
Fuck. I nearly beat my head against the steering wheel. I’d eased off the gas and started to look for a place to turn around before I sat up straight, mentally firmed my spine, and sternly told myself to deal with it.
I didn’t need to have my phone glued to me all the time. I wasn’t a twenty-something stereotype, dammit. Besides, it might do Alec good to stew without a response for a while.
Even though it was just about killing me not to know what he’d had to say. Or if he hadn’t replied yet.
Dave. I’d deal with Dave first, and Alec would have to wait.
I parked right by the front door, next to Dave’s car. One other car sat a few spaces down, but I didn’t recognize it. A nice one, though, a new BMW. Unlikely that it belonged to the part-time janitor who was around on weekends, unless my dad had started paying him a lot more than he used to. I thought Dave had been talking to someone else.
A little belatedly, I wondered if I should’ve swallowed my pride and anger and called Alec after all, and asked him to come with me. This whole situation had my hackles up.
Hesitating wasn’t going to get me anywhere, literally. I didn’t have my phone. Dave was right inside, and the sooner I went in, the sooner I’d be able to figure this out.
I got out of the car. My footsteps sounded too loud on the paved walkway to the front door, like that scene in a horror movie right before everything went wrong.
The front door pushed open. Okay, that shouldn’t be making me feel so creeped out. Shelburne Point wasn’t exactly Manhattan, or even downtown Burlington. Of course Dave had left the door unlocked when he went in.
Except that Dave always locked things. I’d gotten locked out of the house more times than I could count as a kid because of my brother’s OCD door habits.
Wronger and wronger. Shit, I really, really wished I had my phone.
The remnants of the party still littered the huge central room: cocktail tables and the broken-down bar leaned against a wall, a few trash bags full of linens waiting to be taken away, a couple of boxes of empty wine bottles.
No Dave.
I cocked my head and listened. For just a second, I heard a man’s voice raised in almost a shout from the back, and then it cut off abruptly.
I ran toward it, like every stupid horror movie hero in history. What if my brother was having some kind of mental episode? What if the stress of working for our dad day-in and day-out had finally made him crack? I’d have lost it years before, I’d been in his shoes.
My footsteps pounded on the rental flooring, echoing between the boards and the concrete beneath. “Dave? Dave, where are you?” I called out. “I’m here, okay? Everything’s fine!”
The back of the room opened up completely with hangar-style doors, to allow half-built yachts to be moved in and out, but that was shut and locked. A normal person-sized metal door next to it stood propped open with a doorstop, and I shoved it the rest of the way open and then skidded to a panting halt, nearly tripping over a pile of rolled-up neon-colored yoga mats that lay across the doorway.
The door opened onto a loading-dock type area. In addition to the yoga mats, and the usual crates and tools, the area held a single chair, occupied by Dave. Who’d been tied to it, his ankles bound to the legs of the chair with duct tape, and his hands fastened down with more duct tape wrapped around the seat of the chair and over his lap and forearms.
Adam stood next to him, a gun pointed at his head.
For a second my vision blurred, black spots dancing in front of my eyes. I wavered and caught myself on the doorframe.
“The what?” Not the most intelligent response, but I could hardly think, let alone process what the fuck was happening. I didn’t have any problem with guns, and was actually a pretty good shot. My prep school had offered marksmanship as one of its electives. But it turned out having one pointed at you, with the hole at the end of the barrel looming disproportionately huge and black given its actual size, made a really big difference. “What?”
Adam sneered at me, and he swung the gun back to point right at Dave’s head. “The FBI agent,” he said slowly and carefully, like I was the insane one here. “Alec, or whatever he calls himself. Where the fuck is he?”
Alec. FBI agent. Alec?
Oh, shit.
Like a slow-motion landslide, everything fell into place. Alec hadn’t been interested in my money, because he wanted something else: an idiot he could use to gather information. If he’d been investigating Adam—and given Adam had me and my brother at gunpoint, that didn’t feel like a stretch—then I’d have been the perfect idiot. Connected to Adam, but not too closely connected. Able to get Alec in the door at Middleton Marine to poke around undercover.
He hadn’t wanted to sleep with me, probably because he had some little tiny shred of a conscience that told him fucking someone under false pretenses was, you know, fucking wrong.
Until sleeping with me got him upstairs into the executive offices.
And then, line crossed…so he might as well get all the rest of the milk for free, since he’d never had any real interest in the cow.
Adam’s harsh, cracking laugh snapped me out of my misery. Right. Gun. I blinked away the moisture in my eyes. I had bigger problems than being treated like a disposable object.
“Oh my fucking God,” Adam said, his voice going high, the gun shaking in his hand and bumping against Dave’s head. Dave winced and flinched, and Adam hit him with the barrel, on purpose this time, not hard enough to concuss him but definitely hard enough to hurt. Adam’s face had gone mottled white and purple, and his eyes held a crazed, terrifying gleam. “Are you fucking kidding me right now? You didn’t know?”
Oh God, oh God, what was my move here…Adam was obviously losing his shit. He’d kill us both. And I didn’t even know what he’d done to attract the FBI’s attention in the first place. If I told Adam I hadn’t knowingly assisted Alec’s investigation, would that make him more or less likely to shoot me?
“Of course he didn’t know,” Dave spat, stupidly in my opinion. But bravely. God, Dave was such a stubborn asshole, for good and for ill. “Gabe wouldn’t have brought an agent to our party without giving me or Dad a heads-up. He has some loyalty, unlike you, you fucking prick!”
“Shut up!” Adam shouted, and ground the barrel of the gun against Dave’s temple. “This didn’t need to have anything to do with you!”
“What didn’t?” I demanded, desperate to attract Adam’s attention away from Dave. Adam might shoot any second. He needed to cool down, just a little bit, fuck, just a little. Maybe if he shot at me, at this distance and with his hands shaking he’d wing me instead of killing me.
He didn’t bite. The gun stayed firmly pressed against my brother’s head. Sweat trickled down Dave’s face, and he’d gone kind of frighteningly pale under his yachting tan.
“Nothing that has anything to do with you either,” he snarled. “Or it shouldn’t have, until you snuck your Fed upstairs to look through my stuff. And then Dave, here,” he gave the gun another shove, “had to show up today, while I was trying to get everything out of here!”
My mind raced, my heart raced, and the rest of my body felt like I’d been frozen in some kind of toxic Jell-O. I had to get that gun away from Dave’s head. Even if Adam didn’t shoot him, Dave looked like he might go into serious shock any second.
“Get what out of here?” I asked, my voice coming out shaky as hell. Not surprising. I could feel my heartbeat in my hair at this point. “What have you been doing, Adam? How do you know Alec’s FBI? And why did you want me to bring him here, if you’ve been doing something wrong? You know what, it doesn’t matter. Just—tie me up too, okay? And go. Take your—whatever it is, and go, and you’ll be long gone by the time anyone checks up on us.”
“Right, because you expect me to believe Alec isn’t already on his way here with the entire sheriff’s department. I wanted him here alone so I could deal with him before he told anyone.” Oh, God. Deal with him. That could only mean one thing. And if Adam was desperate enough to try to kill a federal agent…I thought I might throw up. If he’d be willing to kill Alec, what would he do to us? Adam fulfilled my worst fears when he said, “No. Dave can stay here, but you’re coming with me. I need a hostage.”
He swung his gun in my direction, his aim a lot steadier than I’d expected, the barrel yawning wide in my terrified gaze.
Fuck. I’d accomplished my goal, but somehow I didn’t feel much better.
Maybe Alec really was on his way with every cop in Shelburne, and I only had to stall for time.
And maybe not. Because I could hear the rumble of an engine, now that I was listening for it. Adam’s boat, almost certainly, moored out back and ready to go.
Maybe I’d die in the next five minutes, and that text I’d sent would be the last time he’d ever hear from me. Maybe Adam would take me on his boat and kill me out on the lake, or I’d get killed when the Coast Guard came after us.
Either way, I didn’t think I’d make it.
14
Alec
My phone dinged right as I’d almost finished with all the financial reports that’d finally, finally hit my inbox. I let it sit for a minute, needing to get through the last of it.
Dave’s hadn’t shown anything out of the ordinary, just as it hadn’t the first time we’d checked him out when we started looking at Middleton Marine.
But Whipley’s. The dirt on him would’ve overflowed a landfill. Gambling, high-interest loans, unpaid credit cards…every red flag you could possibly want, if you were looking for someone who might turn to drug smuggling as a way out of his ever-deepening financial hole. I wished we’d investigated him sooner, but we’d focused on the company owners, not on the employees. That had been a mistake, but at least getting a warrant for his yacht wouldn’t be challenging, given the match between photos, the evidence suggesting other connections to Middleton Marine, and his personal finances.
I snatched up my phone. That had probably been Gabe messaging me. I’d need to put him off somehow, no matter how many promises I’d made to come by for lunch. Saturday or not, my bone-deep longing to fall back in bed with him and make him smile and laugh and come notwithstanding, I had a job to do.
I opened his message.
Going to the factory to see Dave. Called me all worked up. He didn’t tell you about me getting kicked out. Why did you lie? Call me ASAP.
It took a second for that to sink in, with all of its ramifications. He knew I’d lied to him. Dave, at the factory. He’d gone too.
My blood ran cold. Fuck, had I been completely wrong to assume Whipley had to be my perp? Would Dave hurt his own brother? Lots of people would. I saw it all the damn time, in my line of work.
It could be something else. Dave might’ve needed Gabe’s help with something legitimate, like…some kind of document relating to a family trust, for example, that might need both brothers’ signatures.
Right. On a Saturday at the factory, not a Monday morning at the family lawyers’ office. With Dave calling ‘all worked up.’
I punched the button to call back. It rang, meaning Gabe’s phone was on, but he didn’t pick up. I hung up on his voicemail and called back. Same thing.
Fuck, what now? He might be on his way already, but couldn’t he fire off a one-word text? Pull over and answer, since he’d demanded I call him back right away? Or hell, even answer while he drove. I might be law enforcement, but I�
�d leave the hands-free ticketing to the locals.
I dialed another number as I shrugged into my holster and jacket, grabbed my badge and keys, and pelted down the motel stairs.
“Brickell,” said the gruff voice of my BPD liaison.
At least someone knew how to answer the damn phone. “I need a couple of backup units at the Middleton Marine factory out on Shelburne Point. I’m on my way out there now. Can you coordinate with the locals over there? I think there might be a situation…”
I filled him in briefly, switching over to the car’s hands-free as I backed out of the motel lot.
“Hang on a minute,” he said, and I heard him telling someone else in the background to call the Shelburne PD. “All right. What do we tell them? You think there may be a hostage situation? Because I doubt they have anyone trained in that. They definitely don’t have a SWAT unit. We’re happy to loan one, but we need to mobilize them.”
I hesitated. Gabe might be in danger.
On the other hand, calling out a SWAT team because my sort-of boyfriend might be having a heated argument with his brother—which would be how AD Kyle would see it—seemed a little disproportionate. And likely to get me sent to Anchorage after all.
“Just a couple of units of regular PD,” I said at last. “And that might even be overkill.”
“You got it. They’ll meet you there. Low profile?”
“Yeah, please. No lights and sirens. If we do have a situation, I’d like to have the element of surprise.”
Brickell agreed and hung up, and I stepped on the gas.
It took a full twenty-five minutes from the motel to Middleton Marine. I calculated in my head as I drove. If Gabe had already been in the car when I called, then he’d have a five-minute head start, plus the extra five minutes my motel’s distance from the factory tacked onto my ETA.
Undercover (Vino and Veritas) Page 14