'It isn't that. I just never expected to see you in my father's room. What are you doing here, Mr. Tyler?'
'Hell, Christine, you can call me Ty. You used to call me Uncle Ty, remember?'
'Does my father know you're here?'
'Hell no, and he wouldn't like it one bit. Your old man would like to see me dead.'
'I'm sure that's not true. He was very sorry about what happened to you.'
Tyler growled his disagreement, the sound of water gurgling down a pipe. 'I'll say this for your Daddy, though. He was always a good record keeper. Me, hell I never wrote a memo in my life. Hated meetings and business lunches. I'd just tromp around in the fields and find the oil so your Daddy could dicker over mineral rights and sew up the deals that would make us rich. Or at least make one of us rich.'
'Mr. Tyler, what's going on?'
'Here, look at this,' he said, holding up a file folder. 'Your Daddy carries around some interesting reading material in his briefcase. Player contracts under negotiation, loan extensions, licensing agreements, and then there's-'
'You have no right to be going through his things.' She closed the distance between them and snatched the file away. On top was a legal document with 'Escrow Agreement' written in fancy script. She hadn't seen it before and had no intention of reading it, but the 'party of the second part' caught her attention.
Robert C. Gallagher.
The 'party of the first part' was her father.
The escrow agent was her father's bank.
The subject of the escrow was two per cent of the stock in the Dallas Mustangs.
What in the world!
'You still wrinkle your forehead when you're thinking just like you did when you were a little girl,' Tyler said. 'Well, what do you think about all that legalese? I ain't no Philadelphia lawyer or even a Corpus Christi lawyer, but it seems to me your father's bet the farm on a football game.'
Her first thought was that it was a forgery, an elaborate fake. Maybe Houston Tyler brought the document here. Maybe he was setting Daddy up. But she recognized both signatures. What had Bobby told the night he was beaten up at the party?
'Your father doesn't care what you want! He doesn't care what Scott wants! He's a megalomaniac who wants to control everyone around him. He's immoral and corrupt! He's even betting on the Super Bowl.'
She had laughed at him and asked how Bobby would know.
'Because the bet is with me! It's for five million dollars.'
She had called him a liar. Dismissed everything he had said about her father and Craig. She'd been such a fool. For the second time today, she felt betrayed. First by her fiance, then by her father. Her throat was constricted, her windpipe tightening up. Her limbs felt stiff and brittle, as if they might shatter like the stems of wineglasses.
'Looks like your Daddy's fixing to win himself five million dollars,' Tyler said.
'I don't know anything about it.' She wondered what other secrets Daddy and Craig shared,
Oh Bobby, I need you now!
'I'm glad to see that Martin's getting creative, seeing how he owes me the five million dollars that's in the pot. I just wonder what that old fox is gonna due if he loses.'
40
The house was simply too quiet.
It had only been hours, but how he missed his son. What would it be like next week, next month, next year?
If there is a next week.
Bobby lay in a hammock strung between a red poinciana tree and a scraggly palm in the backyard of his cottage just off Tigertail in Coconut Grove. It was an old Cracker house made of Dade County pine with a sloping tin roof and a ragged coral rock wall surrounding the property. The mesh hammock was torn in several spots, and Bobby threatened to tumble to the ground like a fish slipping out of a net. He reclined in the darkness, listening to the night birds, sipping his third Samuel Adams, thinking it was time to take action. But what?
The Super Bowl is fixed, but the wrong way. Denver's quarterback is throwing the game!
Even worse, he'd lost his son, who at this very moment, was with his grandfather at a Fox network party. Bobby didn't have a prayer of getting back his law license or Christine. Come Monday, when he couldn't pay Vinnie LaBarca, he was a dead man.
And so he found his plan. A simple one-word plan. Run.
Run Bobby, run.
Pago Pago, Bora Bora, Abu Dhabi. Poetic names of exotic places blew into his head on steady trade winds. Why not go? He'd get word to his son, somehow, once he was safe.
He hoisted himself out of the hammock, tossed the empty beer bottles at an open trash can, hitting one out of three. With the sound of broken glass and his own shattered thoughts still ringing in his ears, he entered the cottage, which would have fit neatly into the garage of his old house in Dallas. Christine's house now.
Christine. Will I ever see you again?
Bobby headed west on Tamiami Trail, the old two-lane road that cuts through the Everglades. He'd drive to Tampa and get a flight from there. Maybe he was being paranoid, but then again, why risk flying out of Miami and being spotted? With LaBarca's connections, who knows what he might come up with if he started checking the international flights?
But what if LaBarca had him under surveillance? When he pulled the limo out of the gravel driveway just after ten p.m., wasn't there a car at the end of the block that took off after him? And now, staring back into those headlights, isn't it the same car?
He thought about Dino Fornecchio. Wouldn't he love some payback? Bobby knew he'd been lucky in Skarcynski's hotel room. He'd caught Fornecchio off guard. But now, the punk would be ready and armed.
Bobby hit the accelerator, and the old limo whinnied like a spavined nag, backed off, then sped up. The car behind him fell back, picked up speed, closed to within two car lengths, then flicked its high beams.
Oh shit.
Bobby floored it, and the big Lincoln engine seemed to remember its childhood, because it roared to life and in a moment, the speedometer was flicking between eight-five and ninety. Behind him, the other car kept pace. On both sides of the road, canals ran parallel to the pavement, the water black and still in the night. Somewhere beyond the canals, sawgrass towered eight feet high, but on this moonless night, Bobby couldn't see past the reach of his headlights.
The car behind him tooted its horn twice and gave a right turn signal. They wanted him to pull over. No way! He flew past a strand of Brazilian pepper trees, standing sentinel, casting shadows in the glare of his high beams.
Ahead, a lone pair of headlights, appeared, headed eastbound. In a moment, a huge tractor trailer blew by them, the limo shimmying in its wake. Again, it was just the two cars, screaming westward on the old road. Bobby hoped he didn't hit a stray alligator and flip over into the canal.
He squinted against the glare of the high beams in his rear view mirror. Then, suddenly, they were gone. It took a second to realize that the car had pulled into the left lane and was crawling up on him. Were they going to ram him? Were they going to push him into the black water and watch him drown?
He thought of Scott and of Christine. How did he muck up everything?
He shot a look to the left as the car pulled alongside. He expected to see a window come down, a gun barrel come up.
He inadvertently pulled to the right and his wheels slipped onto the berm. He hit the brakes, too hard, and
