T. Lynn Ocean - Jersey Barnes 03 - Southern Peril (15 page)

“Pick me up!” I yelled, and ran in the opposite direction from where we’d left Brad’s Murano. I found the parked motorcycle—a Harley Softail with a custom paint job—and fired two rounds into the sidewall of its front tire. Cussing, Leather Vest rounded the corner of the building and took aim at me. From the other direction, Brad sped into the line of fire and slowed enough for me to throw myself into the passenger’s seat. We peeled out of the convenience store lot, taking a couple of hits in the rear of the SUV.

“Here I was,” I said, returning the Ruger to my thigh holster and strapping myself into the seat belt, “thoughtful enough not to
ruin his twenty-thousand-dollar bike when I shot out the tire. I mean, I could have put some lead into the engine. Or the cowhide seat. And he thanks us by shooting up your car.”

“No biggie,” Brad said. “ ’Long as we still have all our body parts.”

In unison, we pulled out our cell phones, looked at each other, and laughed. I put mine away. Brad could call it in. He was the officially working person between the two of us. He dialed and identified himself as an agent, recited a number, and gave brief details of an unidentified shooter at Bob’s Mini-Mart. Suspect believed to have been riding a motorcycle, which was currently disabled.

“Hold for the description of the motorcycle,” he said, and waited for me. I recited the make and tag number, hoping it was registered to the man riding it. It would be nice to find out who’d been sent to intercept me at the minimart. And who’d sent him.

We drove erratically for five or eight miles, Brad taking lots of last minute turns to make sure we didn’t have a shadow. We didn’t. He pulled into a strip mall parking lot, did a quick walk-around to check out the damage on the Murano, returned to the driver’s seat.

“Vehicle’s fine,” he said.

“We need to get to Pat Viocchi’s house, don’t we.”

Brad nodded, thinking the same thing.
Somebody
had tipped off the network to the fact that an agent was going to try to make a pickup at Bob’s Mini-Mart. If that someone was Pat, she could be in danger. To them, she was now a problem.

“Give me the address from that checkbook you lifted,” Brad said.

I did. He entered it into a nav system. After calculating our route, the device told us we’d arrive in fourteen minutes. We got there in eleven. Pat’s address belonged to a quiet neighborhood consisting of two-story brick town homes woven along golf course fairways. Brad headed to the back while I knocked on the front door. A lapdog—by the sound of it—started yapping. Nobody answered. I knocked again
and rang the bell. Nothing. After a minute, Brad opened the door to let me in, a terrier bouncing around his ankles.

“Back slider wasn’t locked,” he said. “Looks like somebody jimmied it open.”

Weapons ready, safeties off, we searched both levels, starting downstairs. We found Pat Viocchi on the upstairs master bathroom floor, her head twisted at an unnatural angle. Grayish skin contrasted sickly with the white terry robe wrapped around her body. Milky, unseeing eyes stared up at the vanity.

“Oh, crap,” I said, panic crushing my lungs. “I’m out of here.”

Ten minutes later, Brad found me outside, sitting in Pat’s small courtyard behind the town house, watching a foursome of men hit golf balls off the red tees. “You okay?”

“It’s the dead body thing,” I said.

He almost laughed but stopped himself. “You were serious about that?”

I nodded. “Strange considering what I used to do for a living.”

“And yet you drive a hearse.”

“It’s a long story,” I said. “What happened to her?”

He joined me at the patio table. “Broken neck. Shower is damp, so it probably happened when she got out. Her place was searched. Neat job of it, but whoever killed her was looking for something.”

I felt my spine crumple and I slumped in my seat. “She double-crossed me, didn’t she.”

“Junkies are unpredictable, Jersey. After she had a chance to think about it, she decided that she didn’t want to lose her supplier of drugs.”

“So she called the network and tipped them off about me going to the minimart,” I said. “Guess you can’t trust a drug addict, regardless of how well groomed and coiffed they are.”

Brad nodded. “Probably thought she’d score some brownie points. Earn herself a freebie or two. Teacher’s pet syndrome.”

“But the network had other ideas,” I mumbled. My actions had resulted in the death of a woman. “They couldn’t chance her talking.”

“Look, in an operation like this one,
everyone
is disposable except for the person or people at the very top,” Brad said. “That’s the reason it works so well, and that’s the reason this case has been frustrating the hell out of me. They operate by using
disposable people.
The buyers, the stationary runners who make the deliveries. The brain running the network will never let any one person know too much. That’s why the pickup locations rotate and the phone numbers constantly change. If a user gets too needy or problematic, the network drops them. Simply doesn’t give out the new phone number. Same thing with the runners. They start demanding more of a cut or steal product, they’re dropped. Anyone talks too much, they’re dropped.”

“Or in this case, killed.”

The golfers finished taking turns from the tee box and headed noisily down the cart path. Brad gripped my chin and turned my face toward his. “Question for you. Say you’re at home and a hyped-up junkie breaks in to search for something he can pawn. He needs forty bucks for his next fix.” He stared into my eyes. “You yell for him to stop, to go away. Instead, he keeps coming at you. He has a gun. What do you do?”

“I shoot him,” I said. “He probably dies.”

“Right. But
you
didn’t kill him. Bad decisions killed him. Same goes with the woman in there. She made a string of bad choices.”

I understood what Brad was trying to do, but it didn’t make me feel better.

“Stop second-guessing yourself,” he said. “We’ve got work to do.”

“We?”

“If I know you, you’re going to stay on this thing, right? Get some answers for your judge friend?”

I nodded.

“Well then, we may as well help each other and work together. Unofficially, of course.”

I nodded again.

Brad made a phone call. Within minutes, we heard the wail of approaching sirens. He had to make a report to his boss, he told me, but my name wouldn’t be on it.

“Thank you,” I said, and headed out on foot, leaving Brad to wait for the police.

“Jersey,” he called. I stopped and turned. “Have you told me everything you’ve found related to this case?”

“Yes,” I answered, close enough to see his eyes in the fading daylight.
Mostly everything.
“Can you say the same?”

The sirens grew closer. “You’d better go,” he said.

The divine image
doctors were back at the Green Table, and Morgan couldn’t resist learning more. A secret from their past had come back to haunt them, and Morgan wanted—no,
needed
—to know what it was. He craved the information and justified his action of eavesdropping by telling himself he might gain insight into Argo’s mysterious secrets. The doctors’ past could explain why somebody had rummaged through his apartment and searched his car and why the Drug Enforcement Agency was keeping tabs on the restaurant. After all, the doctors had been good friends with his parents. Garland was “like family” to them, they’d said. And if that was true, then Morgan had every right to learn what the doctors were up to. He had a vested interest. Even though he and Garland never acted like family, he still carried the man’s DNA. And now he owned Argo’s. His father’s legacy, really. The more he learned about the restaurant and read past reviews, the more he realized that Garland had left his mark on Wilmington. At first, Morgan wasn’t sure
what he planned to do with the eatery once the estate was settled. Now, he knew he’d keep it. Maybe even expand. And once he learned what he needed to know, he would destroy the hidden microphone. Until then, Morgan told himself, he was going to do something that would make Garland proud. Perhaps his father had put the microphone in place at the Green Table
for a reason.
If so, Morgan was the only person left to figure it out.

The earbud practically pulsed in his ear when Morgan shut himself in the small office and settled in to eavesdrop. Out of habit, he hit a combination of keyboard strokes to tab through the various security camera views on his monitor. He paused on the front-entrance camera when he spotted a bum walking in. The man bypassed the hostess and went to the bathroom. The doctors were talking about their receptionist—nothing that interested Morgan—so he kept his attention focused on the monitor. The bum came back into view and stopped, as though looking around the dining area. His pants were baggy, held up by a tightened belt, and his shirt appeared dirty. A line of unkempt curly black hair escaped from beneath a baseball cap, and when the man turned to go, Morgan caught a glimpse of a face that looked just like his father’s. This man was much thinner than Garland had been, and his posture was slumped instead of robust, but he could have been Garland’s double. Or brother. Except Garland didn’t have any brothers.

Morgan braced himself on the desk as a blast of vertigo rolled through his core. When he opened his eyes, the bum was going back outside. Morgan’s mind was playing tricks on him. He had hated his father. Yet he’d decided to keep Argo’s once the estate was settled, in memory of Garland’s accomplishments? And now he was seeing the dead man in a stranger’s face? He wondered if the bum was hungry and thought about taking a container of food outside. But he knew the man had already disappeared.

Once his dizziness passed, Morgan switched the monitor back to
the dining room view and located the doctors. He probably needed sleep, Morgan figured. And exercise. Sleep and exercise would do him good.

“Seriously, John, you really need to lay off the booze,” Leo was saying, “and whatever else you’ve been prescribing for yourself.”

Jonathan told Leo to shove it.

“He’s right,” Michael said.

Michael seemed to be the peacekeeper of the group, Morgan thought, while Leo was their leader. Jonathan was the resident drunk.

“It may or may not have been your student ID that allowed him to track us,” Michael continued. “Either way, it doesn’t matter. We’ve been a team since the beginning, and we’ll still be a team when we decide to retire. That means we’ve got to stick together to get through this mess. And
that
means that you keep your act together and keep treating patients as usual.”

Jonathan mumbled something indecipherable, but on the monitor he appeared to nod his agreement. Then he took a long swig of whatever he’d ordered on the rocks. He kept his head back until the glass held nothing but ice.

“You could always take a leave of absence,” Leo suggested. “Sign up for a continuing education course, someplace warm and tropical. Get your head clear.”

The shrink said something about paying the monthly fee. “Plus, who’s going to write the scrips if I’m not around?”

A server, Hank, delivered a calamari-and-artichoke-heart appetizer along with three small plates. He asked about drink refills. Everyone declined except for Jonathan, who ordered a double Scotch, neat. On the monitor, Morgan saw Leo and Michael exchange a look over their partner’s drunken binge.

“First of all, we can swing the monthly payment with or without you. It’s just one more office expense. And as for the scrips, Leo and I can write enough to keep him happy,” Michael said. “Besides,
it’s not like we’re the only physicians he’s got. I told him right off the bat that we wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize our licenses. That means no excessive scrips, other than the standard painkillers that our plastic surgery patients need anyway.”

Jonathan let out a sloppy laugh. “Right. So I refer my patients elsewhere and take off for a month. Which of you is going to prescribe the psychotropic stuff like Ritalin and Adderall? Might seem odd to the medical board that a lipo or bleph patient would need stimulants.”

The men ate their appetizer in silence, Jonathan picking at the same piece of calamari for several minutes. His Scotch arrived. Without ice it was easier to gulp, and he did.

“I miss Rosemary so much sometimes I can’t stand it,” Jonathan suddenly said.

Morgan’s spine tingled at the mention of his mother’s name. How many Rosemarys could the doctors know?

“We all miss her.” Leo pushed back his appetizer plate. “Her and Garland both. It’s not the same around here without them. What’s your point?”

The psychiatrist sucked down more Scotch while the two cosmetic surgeons waited for an answer. After a beat, Jonathan realized his glass was empty and put it down. He wiped the back of a hand beneath both eyes. Was the man crying? Morgan wondered.

“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Leo said, his voice filled with disgust. He leaned across the table and forced Jonathan to look at him. “Tell me it’s not true.”

“What?” Michael asked. “What’s not true?”

Leo pointed at the shrink. “You were screwing Rosemary, weren’t you, John.”

“No, of course not. She would never have been unfaithful to Garland,” Jonathan said. “But we could talk to each other, tell each other anything.”

“So then, you were counseling her as a patient?” Michael asked.

The shrink’s slight nod of confirmation was visible to Morgan on the monitor. The office walls started spinning around him like an amusement park ride.

“We always met somewhere outside of the office and just… well, we just talked. We talked about the baby ducks and the weather and relationships and life in general. It started as patient counseling, I guess, but turned into something much more. It was an affair without the sex, I suppose. I’ve never been as intimate with anyone else, ever.”

“You stupid idiot,” one of the doctors said. “You were seeing Garland’s wife away from the office? She was almost old enough to be your mother.”

Through the hot buzzing in his ears, Morgan could no longer tell which man was saying what. He closed his eyes to steady the walls.