Authors: Angela Claire
Michael nodded.
“And if I need more than that, I’ll ask,” he assured Vanny.
“Deal?”
She grinned and pulled him into another hug. “Deal.”
“Enough with the hugs,” Michael muttered.
Nick Dukakis was taking a chance calling in at this stage.
He really was.
Fredrico Stavros was not much for small talk, on the phone
or otherwise. Especially with somebody he paid to do his dirty work.
But Nick had what he thought could be his first big lead and
if he didn’t follow up on it, he could get blamed for it later. On the other
hand, if he did and it wasn’t what the old man wanted, he could get blamed for
that later on too. So he thought he’d better call. Of course he could get
blamed in the first place for bothering the old man. Who the hell knew? He was
so volatile. There was plenty of blame to go around in the Stavros machine but
at least they paid pretty well once you came through.
As long as you weren’t too dead to collect.
“Hey. It’s me. Dukakis,” he said when the old man picked up
the cell number he had been given to call him about this matter.
“Did you find her?”
“Not yet, boss. But I did find out something interesting I
thought I better let you know. Turns out there’s a Reynolds living around where
they found Jimmy dead.”
“Michael Reynolds?”
“Not him. One of the other ones.”
“Lives in Montana, you say?”
“Maine, Freddie,” came from somewhere in the background.
“Yeah, whatever,” he snapped at the comment before saying
into the phone, “that has to be more than a coincidence. I thought that might
all be bullshit asking
me
if I knew where the bitch was. More likely
they hid her away.”
Nick didn’t know about that, but he supposed it was possible.
Add Jimmy to the mix and it was downright likely, maybe. “Yeah, I doubt a girl
could have taken out Jimmy. She had some help, I bet.”
“You don’t know this
girl
,” the old man muttered.
“Anyway, so where do we stand at this point?”
“Well, I been asking around, town by town down the coast,
showing her picture around, and I got to this one and wasn’t having any more
luck, everybody blowing me off, you know, but then I seen him. The Reynolds, I
mean. He was getting out of some fancy Reynolds company helicopter and I
recognized his picture from the file you gave me.”
“And the girl?”
“As I said, I been showing her picture around, but no sign
of her yet. Now I seen him, though, I’m gonna check out his place and—”
“No! Don’t do that.”
Good thing he called, he guessed.
“I do
not
want that family alerted to the fact I’m
looking for the girl, whatever their connection to her may be at this
juncture.”
“But what if she’s with him? I mean—”
“Then get around him. Be subtle. You can continue to ask
around, but you find her on your own! Don’t involve anyone from that family.
All I need is them on my ass again. So I’m warning you, Dukakis, be subtle.”
“Subtle. Yeah. Sure. I can be subtle, boss.”
He said it into the dead air.
* * * * *
Tommy O’Neal had been away from the slums of New York a
pretty long time. But he’d never left them. He recognized danger when he saw
it. He didn’t even want to hazard a guess as to what country the guy at the bar
came from, but he knew he was dangerous. The piece the guy was packing, artfully
concealed under his tailored suit coat, only confirmed it. Finishing the beer
he wasn’t even technically allowed to drink yet, Tommy threw down a five.
“Thanks, man.”
If being raised by the old man for the first thirteen years
of his life had given him nothing else, it had finely honed his sense of when
to skitter away from trouble.
“I tell you, she a beautiful girl. Beautiful. Dark hair,
blue eyes. Maybe a little roughed up or something,” the guy with the accent was
telling Kenny Adams, the bartender.
“I told you, pal, I ain’t seen anybody like that.”
“You didn’t even look at the picture. Look at the picture.”
“Hey, Tommy,” the bartender called down to him. “You see
anybody who looks like this?”
The unfortunate thing about trouble was that if you looked as
if you were trying to avoid it, it’d seek you out big-time.
Tommy went back to the bar without any visible show of
reluctance and looked at the picture Kenny was holding out to him, apparently
care of the swarthy stranger downing a whiskey. “Pretty girl,” he said.
“This is the guy you should be talking to. Nice piece of ass
in this town, then Tommy’s sure to have nailed her.”
Kenny’s instincts on avoiding danger were probably not quite
as seasoned as Tommy’s but they weren’t half bad. Right now Kenny was trying to
deflect the stranger’s attentions from him to Tommy.
“Oh yeah?” the stranger asked. “You see this girl? Got her
in your crib right now?”
Tommy purposefully kept himself guffawing—who the hell said
“crib” around here—and shook his head. “Unfortunately no. But if I see her,
I’ll certainly give it my best shot.”
Grinning casually at Kenny, he was just leaving as he heard
some other anonymous loser call out, “Let me see the picture. I saw this hot
bitch today with Cassie Bailey getting off her boat.”
At the mention of Cassie’s name, Tommy froze.
“Yeah, that’s her,” he heard behind him. “She looked a
little older than that, but I think it was her.”
Tommy headed out of the bar right away and practically ran
the six blocks directly over to the apartment adjacent to Bailey’s Grocery
Store. He had a very bad feeling here.
Even though he was going to incur old man Bailey’s wrath for
ringing the doorbell at this time of the night, he had to do it. Once the door
opened, though, he was momentarily disconcerted that Cassie herself answered
the summons. In a two-size-too-big T-shirt that went down to her knees, her
blonde hair rumpled and falling out of some kind of half-assed braid, she had
obviously just gotten out of bed, even though it was only nine o’clock. He
brushed past her, fighting down the leap of excitement her very presence gave
him, let alone dressed for bed, un-Victoria Secret-like as her outfit was.
“Tommy, what the heck?”
“Where’s your dad?”
“He had to be in Portland early in the morning, so he went
overnight.”
Code, Tommy knew, for the old man getting a piece of
ass—maybe even Evan Reynolds’ mom, if she was still around—which God knew Tommy
did not hold against the widower even though his own daughter would probably be
shocked. But Tommy felt unusually unhappy about it right at this moment, since
that would leave Cassie alone for the night. And given the circumstances,
depending on what was going on here with the guy in the bar, that didn’t
exactly give him a warm and fuzzy feeling.
“And he wouldn’t like you showing up here like this, Tommy.”
An understatement if ever there was one.
“So what are you doing barging in? What’s going on?”
“Shut the door,” he snapped and when she did, he added,
“Lock it.”
Cassie’s eyes got a little wider, but she did.
“Who was the girl you were with this afternoon?”
“What girl?”
“Dark-haired. Blue-eyed. Pretty.”
Cassie’s arms went across her chest, making it clear she
wasn’t wearing a bra, and she frowned, making it clear, big-time, he wasn’t
going to benefit from that fact. “You came all the way over here this time of
night over some girl you’re after? God, you’re a jerk. You know that?”
“Who was she to you?”
“She wasn’t anybody to me. And she’s not going to be anybody
to you either! She belongs to Evan Reynolds. Jesus, why is everybody so
interested in this girl?”
“Belongs to him? What do you mean by that? How do you know
that?”
“She was there when I, er—”
“Whatever.”
“He was gone but she was there and she asked me for a ride
back to town. That was it. Why?”
“When was that?”
“Today.”
“Time?”
Cassie scowled. “Evan Reynolds is going to beat the crap out
of you if you make a pass at her, Tommy.”
He scoffed. “Yeah. I’d like to see that. But what time was
that?”
She rubbed her temple. “I don’t know. Afternoon.”
“Early? Late?”
“Early, I guess.”
The crash at the door startled them both.
“Go back into the bedroom,” he whispered, “and lock your
door.”
“Why?” she whispered back.
The door being kicked in brought the trouble he wasn’t
looking for a bit sooner than he had expected. Kenny or somebody must have fed
the guy directions to Cassie’s.
* * * * *
For all his Thoreau-like pretentions, Evan Reynolds was a
civilized guy. Roughing it had always meant him and nature, him and his own
hands. Savagery had never figured in.
Until now.
When he came back to the island in the early evening to find
no Andrea, only Bingo, he wasn’t entirely surprised. Furious as hell. Heartsick.
But only half surprised.
And when he got his hands on Andrea Prentiss again, he was
going to kill her.
After maybe tying her to the bed or marrying her or some
such shit.
And he
would
get his hands on her again. He was sure
of it. She wouldn’t leave him for good. He knew she wouldn’t. She hadn’t even
done that the first time.
Once he couldn’t find her on the island and then read by
flashlight the curt message she’d scrawled on the fucking chair about getting a
ride back to town with Cassie and not looking for her—blah, blah, blah—he got
right back into his motorboat and headed into town even though he suspected
Andrea wouldn’t be there anymore. Bingo plaintively jumped into the boat with a
howl at the last minute, as if he somehow was responsible for Andrea getting
away and wanted to help. Whatever. At this point, Evan would take all the help
he could get.
He wondered how Andrea even had any money to leave, but he
supposed she had her mysterious “disappearing act” ways down pat by now. Or
maybe she’d stolen some from him. He hadn’t even taken the time to check.
He should have told Michael that Andrea had shown up again.
He should have let his brother hire a SWAT team to surround the island and keep
her on it if he had to.
But he hadn’t. And now she was gone again. He intended to
head into town to see if Cassie could tell him anything and then he personally
was going to call out the fucking cavalry. Michael Reynolds, Damien Reynolds
and every damn Evans connection he could muster.
Tying the boat up at the dock with a noticeable lack of his
usual careful seamanship, he took off for Bailey’s Grocery store, Bingo
trotting beside him, wagging his tail now as if this was all good fun. Despite
the relatively early hour, the streets were empty except for when he made it
into the vicinity of the town bar. There was always a crowd mulling around
there smoking, and tonight was no exception. Although he knew most of the town
regulars by sight, he didn’t recognize this crowd and he walked briskly by.
It wasn’t until a street or two later that he realized the
guy in front of him seemed to be heading the same way as he was. In a suit that
was out of place in this environment—European tailoring—and muttering too
softly for Evan to hear, the guy was probably a vendor or something who had an
appointment with the grocer. He didn’t think anything of it until, as he was
about to close the distance between them, he recognized what language the man
was speaking to himself.
Greek.
He halted abruptly, Bingo dropping to his haunches beside
him, as the guy approached the Baileys’ apartment door, reaching his hands into
his suit coat pocket. And then he pounded on the door—foot first.
It was the stranger from the bar who had been asking about
Reynolds’ girlfriend. No big surprise there. The gun in his hand wasn’t much of
a surprise either. If he’d been meaning to play nice, he would have knocked.
“I don’t want no trouble,” the guy said as Tommy pushed
Cassie behind him.
It was amazing how guys with guns felt so free to use that
expression.
Tommy wished, for probably the first time since he had left
big-city life, that he had a piece too. Trouble was hard enough to avoid when
you were looking down the barrel of a gun at it unless you were able to even
the odds.
“Put your hands up.”
Tommy complied though he could feel behind him that Cassie
had not. Her hands were fisted in the back of his shirt and he could feel her
breath on the back of his neck, she was standing so close.
“What’s the problem, mister?”
“You got the girl here, don’t you? Where is she?”
“I told you back at the bar I hadn’t seen her.”
“And then you come right here. Right. Like I believe that.
You got some kind of three-way thing going, don’t you, kid? Well, I got nothing
against that. I’d like some of that action myself.” The look he gave Cassie
turned Tommy’s stomach. Maybe he wouldn’t need a gun after all if this guy
tried to touch her. The way Tommy was feeling he just might be able to rip him
to shreds.
Hopefully before the guy shot him and, God forbid, Cassie.
Tommy tried for a blasé tone. “I don’t know what you’re
talking about, man. There’s no other girl here. Just me and my girlfriend is all.”
“You.” The man gestured to Cassie with the gun and followed
it up with tugging her out from behind Tommy. Tommy stepped between them again
but the gun barrel sort of necessitated taking a step back. “Where is the girl
you picked up in your boat this afternoon?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know who she was. She just asked
for a ride and I gave it to her.”
It was a perfectly reasonable response, but Tommy could see
she was trembling. Fuck.
“See, I told you we don’t know any girl you been looking
for.” He tried to tug Cassie back to his side and this time he succeeded.
“You’re lying!” the guy spat out for good measure.
“I’m not!”
“What’s this all about anyway?” Tommy asked. “Who is the
girl?”