Now You See Her

THE DOOR CLOSED. A quotation popped into my head as the electric guitar riffed between hip-hop bass thumps next door.

The hard way is the only way.

Whether it was from a writer or the Bible, I couldn’t quite recall. All I remembered was that I never understood it. Why would someone choose for things to be hard?

But as I lay there, my face drenched with tears, an ironlike fear clenching every sinew of my body, I finally knew what it meant.

It meant there were no shortcuts. You had to pay for things. Sometimes, it was your job to go down no matter how unfair things were. Meeting Peter had allowed me to avoid my fate for killing Ramon Pena, at least up until now. Today I was going to pay for that crime with interest.

I remembered how shocked I’d been when I’d seen how resigned to die Justin Harris had been. I wasn’t shocked anymore.

Someone knocked on the door.

But instead of stiffening with a soldierly stoicism like Justin, I went into a full-body twinge of revulsion and horror. My tendons felt like they were about to pop.

“Hola!” said a jolly whisper as the door opened.

The man who stepped in looked more French than Mexican. He was swarthy and tall and lean with long, lustrous shoulder-length black hair. A cigar jutted from his stubbled jaw. In his tailored pinstripe suit coat, an open- throated banker’s shirt, and nice jeans, he looked European, a sophisticate, a rich ne’er-do-well dandy ready for a night on the town.

When he took off his suit coat, I saw that he wore a pearl-handled automatic in a shoulder rig. He smiled at me from around his cigar as he selected a bottle and glass from the bar and poured himself a tall drink of whiskey. He pointed to the drink and then at me in a gallant gesture, wondering if I wanted one.

The handcuffs started click-clacking off the wood as I started to shake.

He shrugged his shoulders in an oh-well gesture. Then he puffed elaborately on his cigar, blew smoke up at the coffered ceiling, and approached the bed.

He was sitting at the foot, pulling off one of his cowboy boots, when there was a noise over the loud music.

It was the wail of an air horn above deck.

Next door, the volume quit as men shushed one another, listening.

“This is the United States Coast Guard!” came the order from a bullhorn. “No one move!”

Two gunshots blasted one right after the other above us. There was a surprised yell in Spanish followed quickly by a splash.

“Don’t move! We will shoot! Don’t move!” the bullhorn speaker said.

There was some more gunfire, and the long-haired man at the end of the bed looked up in shock as running footsteps passed directly overhead.

One boot on, one boot off, his cigar in his mouth and his automatic out, he clopped to the door. He opened it. Then I screamed as he pulled the trigger.

There were more shots and yelling as someone returned fire. A hunk of paneled wood blew out of the wall beside the drug dealer’s head. Then the gun suddenly fell from his hand. The expression on the man’s face was one of curiosity as he looked down at his blood-soaked banker’s shirt. Then there was another violent, earsplitting bang and then another and he fell, sparks from his cigar flying up as he crashed forward onto his face.

I was crying as young men dressed in blue and carrying rifles rushed into the room. After another moment, Charlie, soaking wet, was smiling down at me. He wasn’t dead somehow.

I tried to say something, but found that I couldn’t. It seemed like I was in shock.

Charlie tried to pull me off the bed until he saw the handcuffs. Then he took the baseball bat off the wall and began breaking the bedposts one by one.

Chapter 108

“OK, ONE MORE TIME from the top,” Scott Dippel, the commanding officer of the coast guard ship, said, clicking his pen in one of the now docked cutter’s staterooms.

I was wearing some borrowed USCG sweats and my hair was still wet from, by far, the best shower I’d ever taken in my life. Charlie sat next to me. He was holding a bag of frozen green beans against the lump on his head that he received when he planted his face on the deck.

“Yes, please. From the tippy top, considering we have two men dead and three Mexican nationals in custody,” added FBI Agent Holden. He’d come aboard immediately when we returned to the coast guard’s base.

The Jump Killer, or whoever he was, had been shot dead. Trying to escape in the drug dealers’ boat, he had fired on the coast guard ship. The coast guard guys returned the favor with their fifty-caliber machine gun.

As I was taken aboard, I actually saw his blown-apart body, floating facedown in the water, under the ship’s floodlight. I didn’t need any grief counseling. If anything, my only regret was that I hadn’t been able to do it myself.

“Slowly now,” Dippel said. “Who was the big guy we shot?”

“Captain Bill Spence,” Charlie said. “He’s a client of mine, or he was. He drugged us and threw me overboard. I woke up in the water on my back with two gallons of salt water in my stomach. I saw the yacht’s running lights and dog-paddled toward them for what seemed like three hours. The go-fast speedboat pulled alongside when I was about a couple of hundred feet away. When the Mexican guys boarded the yacht, it took everything I had to drag myself onto their boat, and I used its radio to call you.”

The tall red-haired sailor clicked his pen again. “And the Hispanic men are?”

“Mexican drug dealers,” I said. “Spence abducted women and brought them out to sea and sold them to drug runners who raped and killed them at their sick parties. Which was exactly what would have happened to me if Charlie hadn’t called you.”

“How do you know all this?” Agent Holden wanted to know.

“Spence told me!” I yelled. “Don’t you understand? I wasn’t kidding when I said I knew that Justin Harris didn’t kill Tara Foster. Spence was the Jump Killer. He was the man who tried to abduct me all those years ago. He’s been abducting and selling women since Miami Vice was popular. Not only that, he said the chief of police was involved. Peter Fournier was his partner. In fact, he said Peter ran the drug trade in Key West.”

“That one I can’t understand,” Dippel said. “Peter Fournier? I know him. I’ve eaten at his house. Our kids are on the same baseball team. That can’t be right.”

“You think you feel stupid? I married the man,” I said. “Spence also said Peter had hired him to kill me before I got away.”

“It all actually makes sense now,” Charlie said, shifting the frozen beans to his other hand. “The captain became my client and good buddy right around the time it came out in the local paper that I was representing Justin. He would ask about the case all the time. And I thought he was just a crime buff or something. He was the one who actually offered the free cruise for us to celebrate!”

Holden frowned. “What a goddamn mess,” he said. “This is what you call taking it easy, Baylor?”

Agent Holden left the room to make some calls. An hour later, at around four a.m., he came back in and told us we could leave.

“Your story seems to pan out so far. I checked the registration on the yacht. Peter is actually listed as one of