T. Lynn Ocean - Jersey Barnes 03 - Southern Peril (26 page)

I waved him over. “And recork it, please, so I don’t spill any wine carrying it down to Ruby.”

“Hey, I’ll personally deliver it to your surly customer.”

“Ruby would get a kick out of that.” And a bigger tip, if Brad turned on his charm.

The cork made a sucking pop as Brad pulled it out. “I never order expensive wine. Mind if I try a sip to see what I’m missing?”

“Sure.” I found a wineglass. When he poured, an odd-colored liquid came out, something with the transparency of grape Kool-Aid. He smelled it and passed the glass beneath my nose. It smelled like stale water to me. Brad poured more until the liquid slowed to a dribble and stopped. He held up the dark green bottle to my ceiling light, but we couldn’t quite see through it. Whatever the bottle contained, it wasn’t wine. He wrapped a dish towel around the bottle and smashed it against the inside of my kitchen sink. We found three stuffed Baggies in the soggy mess.

Cracker nosed his way up to the kitchen counter to beg.

“I don’t think you want any of whatever this is,” I told the dog, and gave him a Greenies instead.

Brad tore open one of the Baggies, to find another sealed bag inside. When he cut it open, crystalline, fine white powder poured out.

He dipped in a fingertip and dabbed it on his gums. “Man, oh, man. We’ll have to test it, but I’m guessing this stuff is pharmaceutical-grade cocaine. I can’t feel my teeth.”

“There’s a medical use for blow?” I didn’t know pharmaceutical-grade cocaine existed.

“It’s an analgesic. Rarely used in the U.S. because there are other, better, safer substitutes. But some countries manufacture pure cocaine for medical use.”

“I’m guessing these three Baggies are worth a bunch of Ben Franklins?”

“Something this pure? Oh, yeah. You have more bottles of wine?”

I found the other two, and Brad did the smash routine with them. One held nothing but wine—real white wine. Inside the last one, we found more Baggies of pure coke. We needed to get to Garland’s wine cellar.

“I’ll drive,” Brad said. “Let’s go!”

Forgetting about the waiting food critic, we hustled back downstairs, jogged through the Block, and jumped in Brad’s Murano. “I’ll bet that’s what your earless fellow is looking for. Rosemary was in deeper than we thought.” He peeled away from the curb at the first opening in traffic.

“Or maybe,” I suggested, “she was storing the stuff for him. And then she died. And he’s been trying to figure out where she hid it ever since.”

“That’s
why we saw recorking equipment in the wine cellar,” Brad said. “Rosemary must have been hiding the stuff in wine bottles.”

“Hiding it from who?”

“Her husband, for starters,” Brad said. “And maybe this earless dude you had a run-in with.”

I thought back to when Earless tried to lock me and Morgan in the cooler at Argo’s. He’d been there to look for
something.
And he’d seemed genuinely surprised that Morgan didn’t know anything about his mother’s second job as a dope dealer.

Who
was
this guy?

Brad handled the
SUV like a professional driver, and we made it to Garland’s estate in twenty minutes and got flipped off only once. Circling the estate, we saw no signs of activity. Brad found a box on the exterior of the home that housed cable and telephone wires and started to bust into it. I asked why.

“They have a digital phone, which operates via the cable television system. If I cut the main coaxial cable feed and we trip the security system, it won’t be able to send out a distress call.”

“I have the security system code.” After all, I
was
working for the family, even though I’d never see a paycheck. I’d gotten the code from Morgan.

“Oh,” Brad said.

He pulled out a small set of lock-pick tools and headed for a side door. I asked why he needed it.

“Uh, to get us inside?”

I held up a key. He stood back to let me have the lead. I let us in and deactivated the alarm.

We did a walk-through. Everything appeared just as it had the last time I’d been inside the house: fashionably decorated, clean, undisturbed. We went to the wine cellar, which was really a converted room. It’s rare to find a home with a basement in Wilmington—the underground water table is simply too high, and the land is too flat. That, and the fact that most builders in the area wouldn’t have a clue as to how to build one.

We went into the wine room through two wooden hand-carved doors. Each had a large half-moon pane of stained glass. I heard a faint electronic hum from the room’s climate control system. About the size of a large bedroom, the area was lined along each wall with crisscrosses of wooden wine racks. A tasting table in the center of the room held a fancy mounted corkscrew and, in cabinets below, a variety of wineglasses.

Starting on opposite walls, we examined the wines, searching for the same label affixed to the bottle that we had opened at the Block. We found seven such bottles. They looked and felt like real wine, and we couldn’t tell if they were bogus or not.

“Guess there’s nothing to do but open them,” Brad said.

Arms loaded with the suspect bottles, we headed to the kitchen sink. The first bottle Brad busted open held only wine. Same for the second. Bottles three, four, and five contained Baggies of white powder. He pulled a phone from his pocket and made a call. Soon, Garland’s house would be swarming with agents. I didn’t like it, but I understood. After all, how could he waltz in and dump hundreds of thousands of dollars of illicit product in the evidence lockup without ever having a thorough search of the grounds?

“You’re not planning to do the same for the Block, I hope.”

Brad said no. “No reason to mention that the original bottles came from your place. I’ll spare you the hassle.”

“My goodness,” I said. “You actually seem human sometimes.”

We returned to the wine room for another, more thorough search, examining every bottle carefully.

“It would be a shame,” Brad said, “but we may end up having to open up every bottle in here just to be sure. Too bad you don’t like wine.”

“We could always gather up some friends for a wine-and-cheese shindig—”

I heard a sound outside the double doors and, drawing my weapon, spun to see Earless standing in the wine room entryway with a gun of his own.

“You!” His face showed a split second of recognition before he started firing. Brad and I dove for cover behind the tasting table, took blind aim for the double doors, and let loose. A firestorm echoed in the enclosed room as bottles exploded and wood splintered in every direction.

“New mag,” Brad said, and stopped firing long enough to eject the magazine and shove in a full one. The instant I heard it click into place, I did the same with my gun, timing it so we wouldn’t both be dry at the same time. The incoming shots had stopped, and we stayed stock-still to listen for movement in the echoing silence. Earless had trapped us in a confined room with only one way out. It was a huge tactical disadvantage.

“I’m going to take a look,” Brad whispered. “Now!”

I peppered the doorway with bullets to cover him while Brad exposed his head enough to see out of the wine room. He dropped back down and squatted next to me. “Nothing.”

Muzzles leading the way, we crept to opposite sides of the tasting table and surveyed what we could see. Without warning, a chunk of
Sheetrock burst inward. Bottles exploded behind us and we scrambled back behind the tasting table.

“He’s shooting through the wall!” Brad said. “Do you remember what’s on the other side of this room?”

I visualized the layout. “Open area, pool table, card table. Like a game room.”

“We’ve got to get out of here.”

“I’ll second that.” We moved out of Garland’s wine cellar, me crouching low and Brad going high. Once out of the room, we stood back to back, guns quiet, moving in a slow circle to look for the shooter. Nothing.

“I’ve only got two shots left,” I told Brad. “Maybe one.” Back as a SWEET agent, I would have known exactly how many rounds remained during any firing exercise, regardless of the handgun I used. Right now, that seemed like ages ago. And this wasn’t an exercise.

Brad glanced at me. “You don’t carry a backup piece?”

“I’m retired.”

We continued through the house, went outside the same way we’d come in, through a side door, and headed to the long, shaded drive. I saw movement near the Murano.

“Somebody’s by your car!”

We got close enough to see Earless. He spotted us, took aim over the hood of the Murano, and started shooting.

We scrambled behind a tree. “Pick your shots,” Brad said, meaning that he didn’t want his car trashed. I took aim just when a figure with a shovel came up behind Earless and hit him over the head. Earless staggered to his knees and crawled a few paces before he scrambled up and ran off. The other man dropped the shovel and took off in the opposite direction, disappearing into a section of thick trees that separated the estate homes.

“I’ve got Earless,” Brad shouted, and took off running.

I went after the benevolent gardener, who looked more like an
elderly bum than someone who should be digging holes. An elderly
African American
bum. I had a pretty good idea who he was.

Even
running in strappy flats, I caught up with him four houses away, on somebody’s pool deck. I threw my weight—all 130 pounds of me—against his back, sending us both tumbling into a padded lounge chair.

“You hit like a damn linebacker, for Pete’s sake,” he grumbled, rolling out from under me. “What are you—one of those girly bodybuilders or something?”

When we were both standing and had brushed ourselves off, I got a close-up look at his face. It was bearded and scraggly—not the same clean-shaven, smiling one I’d seen in the picture on Morgan’s wall. But it held the same features and the same bushy eyebrows. Just thinner. And tired.

“Garland?” I stuck out my hand. “I’m Jersey Barnes. And I wouldn’t have had to tackle you if you hadn’t run.”

He didn’t shake my hand. “I’ve seen you hanging around my son. Who are you?”

I told him that his daughter, the judge, had enlisted my help.

“Does she know I’m alive?”

“Nope,” I said. “Where have you been living?”

He decided to shake my hand. “Nowhere. Everywhere.”

“Why aren’t you in protective custody?”

He showed me a grin that, despite the circumstances, was full of mischief and rebellion. “I sprung myself, for Pete’s sake.”

I stared at the man who could have been my father’s brother, except for his skin color. “I think you and Spud are going to get along fabulously.”

I told Garland about the private stairwell that ran from the street directly to Spud’s apartment above the Block. Back when the
old building had been a brothel, the stairwell was a necessity. It was no longer used, but it was still there, the worn wooden steps solid.

“There’s a sign that says,
NO ENTRY.
I’ll see that the door is unlocked. And I’ll tell my father to be expecting you,” I said. “Now get out of here before the DEA agent sees you. We’ll talk when you get to the Block.”

Grumbling about a bruised shoulder, Morgan’s dead father loped through a patch of pink oleanders and disappeared. Watching him go, I suspected that Brad was behind the faked death. What I didn’t yet know was why. Once again, it occurred to me that my new DEA friend wanted every ounce of information I had to offer regarding Argo’s. Yet he sure wasn’t sharing his intel with me, including the fact that Garland was still among the living.

When
I got back to Garland’s estate, Brad had a phone to his ear, his expression livid. He gave a description of Earless and slammed the phone shut.

“I lost him,” he told me.

Fresh grass stains dotted the knees of Brad’s jeans. He caught me looking.

“I tripped over a Big Wheel, dammit.”

I almost kept a straight face. “I lost my guy, too. He vanished. Maybe he lives around here and disappeared into a house.”

Brad eyed me.

I shrugged. Until I knew more, I wasn’t sharing anything else with Brad.

“What was Earless doing here?” Brad rubbed his knee and bent it a few times, checking for damage. “He recognized you, right before he started firing. But he was surprised. He didn’t expect to find anyone in the house.”

“He was here for the same reason we were,” I reasoned. “To look
for the cocaine. He suspected it was here, but he didn’t know where. And he probably assumed that enough time had passed—that everyone who was going to had finished trudging through the house for the time being.”

We went back inside Garland’s home to survey the damage. DEA agents would arrive shortly. I felt sure that a neighbor had reported gunshots, so the local PD was probably on their way to the party, too. I called Dirk, just to give him a heads-up. Neighborhood shootings in Wilmington are not common. There would be a lot of hoopla, even though there wasn’t a body.

“I just saw you a few hours ago at the Block,” Dirk’s voice came through the phone. “How do you manage to stir up so much trouble in so little time?”

“Long-handled spoon,” I told him, and hung up.

Brad came out of the wine room, where reds and whites mingled into potent-smelling puddles on the tiled floor. “We’ve got a bloody print,” he said. “Looks like a clean print, too. And a few drops of blood.”

I didn’t think either one of us had grazed Earless. I knew we hadn’t made a direct hit. “He must’ve gotten cut by flying glass.”

“Thank goodness for that, because if he’s in the system, now we’ll have a name.”

I surveyed Argo’s.
A nice crowd had come. Most important, the Divine Image Group—all three of them—were in place at their customary table. Morgan had hired a courier to deliver the invitations for Argo’s customer appreciation luncheon. Between the “valued patrons” and their guests, more than one hundred hungry people had shown up to claim their free lunch. The plan would cost Morgan some money, but in his words, he’d pay anything to get a normal life back. The servers were happy to work an extra shift, too, since they knew that free food usually equated with generous tips.