Beachcomber (15 page)

He could be watching me right now.

On that heartening note, Christy shivered and quickly slid inside her car. Once her bare thighs made contact with blistering navy leather, she yelped and forgot about her attacker for the moment as she hurriedly pulled a map out of the glove compartment and spread it beneath her legs. She started the car and, would-be murderer or no, rolled down the windows so that the pent-up heat could escape while the air-conditioning cranked up. But she didn’t make a move to go anywhere. A quick glance at the dashboard clock told her that it was one-thirty. She had half an hour to spare and the lighthouse was perhaps ten minutes away.

She had a little time. Enough time to make a call. Existing in terror-filled limbo was not working for her, and she meant to do what she could to make it go away.

Heart pounding with nervousness, unsure of the wisdom of what she was about to do but unable to think of any better way of ensuring that she stayed alive, she pulled out her cell phone, which one of the deputies had thoughtfully returned to her at the clinic, rolled the windows up for privacy, and punched in Michael’s number.

10

C
HRISTY FELT ALMOST SICK
to her stomach as she listened to the phone ring. Of course, the call was going to go through perfectly now that she wasn’t really sure she wanted it to. Was that the way life worked or what?

The last time she had spoken to Michael had been to confront him with Franky’s accusations, with the confirmation of those accusations that she had found while searching the office files, with her own new and terrible knowledge of what he was and what he’d done.

That’s the way things work,
Michael had said impatiently, with none of the shock or penitence she’d expected him to show.
That’s the way things have always worked. Time to come out of your soap bubble, Christy, and shake hands with the real world.

The edited version of her reply could pretty much be summed up like this: I didn’t go to law school to be a crook, so go screw yourself.

She’d been a fool to think that Michael was legit, that the law firm was legit. She saw that now. She should have known that the apple wouldn’t fall far from the tree.

“Welcome to the family,” John DePalma had said at Christmas, when Michael had first told him they were engaged. Remembering the words now made Christy shake her head at her own naïveté.

How thick are you?
she scolded herself with the mental equivalent of a palm clap to her forehead as the phone continued to ring. She’d lived in Atlantic City most of her life—and she knew all the stories about John DePalma. It shouldn’t have been much of a stretch to figure out that he meant family with a capital F.

Maybe, instead of stupid, what she’d been was willfully blind. Half the population of Pleasantville was connected to the mob in one way or another. Heck, crime was practically a cottage industry, the ultimate entrepreneurial opportunity. Nearly every TV and computer and electronic gadget in the neighborhood where she’d grown up had been purchased from Nine-fingered Nick, the local fence. Everybody knew that the laundromat had a bookie operation in the basement and that at the Mickey Dee’s on the corner of Fourth and Main you could pick up a baggie of funny seasonings right along with your burger. But the bottom line was, she’d left Pleasantville behind for the white-collar suburbs of Philadelphia for a reason. If she’d wanted to be a criminal she would’ve stayed put—and she wouldn’t have studied her butt off and worked two jobs and finished first college and then law school at The College of New Jersey, either.

What she’d wanted was the kind of success that didn’t involve constantly worrying about doing a stretch of two-to-ten on the state’s dime when things went wrong.

She’d thought that Michael—dark, handsome, macho
Michael, ten years her senior, a man who wore thousand-dollar suits and had an appreciation for fine wines that, to tell the truth, struck her working-class palate as tasting like cough syrup—felt the same way. Despite who his father was. Despite having grown up in the shadow of the mob. She’d thought he’d had a bellyful of criminal types at a young age just as she had. Obviously, she’d thought wrong.

When he’d offered her a big salary right out of law school to come to work for him, she’d been thrilled to accept, thrilled at the chance to live in Philadelphia, which was just a short ride up the interstate from Atlantic City where her mother and sisters—as well as a number of Michael’s relatives—still lived, thrilled to work for Michael, who had basically taken her, a fledgling lawyer, under his infinitely more sophisticated and knowledgeable wing. In the two years she’d worked at DePalma and Lowery, she’d had her own apartment in a nice high-rise in a nice section of town, a job that she loved, a great wardrobe, a great car, new and simpatico friends and, as the pièce de résistance, a blossoming relationship with Michael. When he’d proposed, over a romantic, candlelit dinner, she hadn’t even had to think it over: she’d accepted with the mental version of a pump-fisted
yes.
For the next few months she’d been happier than she’d ever been in her life, as blissful as Cinderella when she’d first squeezed her toes into that had-to-hurt glass slipper.

Until Franky had shown up at her apartment like the proverbial serpent slithering into Eden. And told her that he’d fouled up an operation Michael’s goons
had sent him on, and he was afraid they were going to kill him.

Michael’s voice answering the phone snapped her out of her reverie. For the first couple of seconds, just the sound of that all-too-familiar voice made her feel dizzy. Her heart pounded. Her breathing suspended. Goose bumps popped up on her arms. Then she realized that what she was listening to was a message and not Michael himself, and she breathed again, slumping a little in the seat with relief. It was then that she finally knew it for sure: she wasn’t in love with Michael anymore. What she felt toward him now was—fear.

“… I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Thanks.”
Beep.

Christy took a deep breath. If she could just talk to him and explain … “It’s Christy. It’s important. Call me.”

Disconnecting, she discovered that her hands were shaking.

She stared at the phone for a minute, then mustered her resolve and placed one more call.

“Yeah?” The voice at the other end was as familiar to her as Michael’s.

“Uncle Vince? It’s Christy.”

His sharp intake of breath was clearly audible. “Jesus Christ, what are you doing calling me? I can’t talk to you now. Shit’s happening here, and—”

There was something in his tone that told her he was getting ready to hang up.

“Somebody tried to kill me last night,” she interrupted desperately. “Was it a hit? Did Michael—or somebody—put a contract out on me?”

There was the briefest of pauses.

“Jesus.”
She heard a sound that she thought was him swallowing. “No, of course not, there’s nothing like that. I told you, if you do what you’re told and keep your mouth shut you’ll be okay.”

“Look, I delivered the briefcase. You told me that was all I had to do. But I got another call last night and—”

“Not on the phone. Don’t tell me over the phone.”
She could hear him breathing hard and fast. “Look, I’ll check it out. The deal was, you deliver the briefcase and you’re out. But maybe something’s changed. Maybe they’re feeling the heat down there like we are up here, and they got to do something different than they planned. You do what they tell you until I say different. I got to go now.”

“Wait! The cottage was broken into—there’s a lot of damage, the locks need to be changed …”

“Call Tony at Manelli Management. He’ll fix it. And then stay off the fucking phone. Don’t call Carmen and get her mixed up in this, whatever you do.”

He hung up.

Don’t call Carmen. Her mother. Christy took a deep breath and closed the phone. No, she wouldn’t call her mom, her chain-smoking, hard-partying, mobster’s moll of a mom, who, for all her shortcomings, loved her and her sisters fiercely. If her mother had any inkling that Christy was in danger, she’d raise enough hell with Vince to be heard all the way to Canada. Then she’d drive down here to Ocracoke. Then she’d raise more hell, till she very likely got herself, and Christy, killed. And maybe Nicole and Angie, too.

Calling her mom was undoubtedly a really bad idea.
But she ached to do it nonetheless. When she had
real
trouble, heartbreaking trouble, world-shattering trouble, her mother was the person she automatically turned to.

Case in point: after confronting Michael, she’d done what any grown-up, self-sufficient woman does after dumping both job and fiancé in one fell swoop—called her mom. Not wanting to say too much until she’d had time to sort out all the implications of her discovery, she’d said only that she and Michael had had a fight. Come home and we’ll talk, had been her mother’s familiar prescription. But when Christy had done just that, driving straight down I-5 to Atlantic City, she’d gotten the biggest shock of all: goons had surrounded her car when she’d stopped at the intersection nearest her mother’s house. They’d forced her out at gunpoint and thrust her into the backseat of a black BMW parked nearby, where Uncle Vince had been waiting. There he’d taken her on what he called a field trip, and in the process spelled out the facts of life for her. Christy’s blood had run cold as she’d finally understood.

If she’d been thinking about going to a prosecutor friend of hers with what she knew—and she had indeed been considering just that—that little field trip with Uncle Vince had dissuaded her. Sick with horror, she’d agreed to do one “favor” for him, i.e., drive the briefcase he’d given her to Ocracoke and wait for a phone call telling her where she should deliver it, after which he had promised that as long as she kept her mouth shut she, and her family, would be left alone forever after. She’d thought she understood: he meant to compromise her by making her party to whatever
criminal enterprise the briefcase was connected to, on the theory that after delivering it she couldn’t go running to the cops whenever she felt like it without getting herself in trouble as well.

Among other negative consequences, a lawyer convicted of a felony could pretty much count on being disbarred. If she went to the cops after doing Uncle Vince’s favor, all her years of hard work might well have been for nothing. Her prized education would go right down the tubes. She would be a criminal, too.

She understood that. And she had been willing to put her future on the line, to deliver the briefcase and be compromised. It was better, way better, than the alternative.

Which involved herself and her mother and sisters being dead.

Because Uncle Vince had made it clear: the threat if she didn’t cooperate wasn’t only to herself, but to her mom and Nicole and Angie, too.

When she’d finally gotten to talk to her mom that night, she’d told her only that she and Michael had broken up, she’d quit her job in consequence, and she was going on a little vacation to Ocracoke, where Uncle Vince had generously offered her the use of the beach cottage to recuperate.

Her mother had had no problem with that. Man trouble she understood.

An imperative rap almost in Christy’s ear made her jump, and brought her sharply back to the present. Heart pounding, she whipped her head around so fast that her neck hurt. When she met Castellano’s dark
eyes she almost levitated through the sun roof before she managed to get herself under control. He’d knocked on her window. The street was full of people, and he was in his deputy’s uniform. What were the chances that he was about to harm her?

Lowering the window, she nonetheless realized that she was breathing too fast and the look she gave him was more than a little wary.

“Is something wrong?” he asked, frowning as his gaze ran over as much of her as he could see. “You’ve been sitting there a long time.”

“I was making a phone call.” From somewhere Christy summoned up a small smile. “But thanks for checking on me.”

“Good enough, then. Sorry to interrupt.” Lifting a hand in farewell, he straightened away from the car. The sun was so bright where he was standing that she had to squint to see him—and what she saw chilled her to the bone. Glare reflecting off the polished surface of the car blurred his features so that he was scarcely more than a shape—and that shape was stocky and powerful and very, very similar to the one she’d seen on the beach.

But was it the same? Dear God, she wasn’t sure.

Heart pounding, Christy raised the window.

Get a grip,
she told herself fiercely as the glass rose between them.
Whether it was him or not, he can’t do anything to me here.

Still, she made haste to be on her way. Conscious of Castellano’s gaze on her, pulse still not back to normal, Christy managed a wave and pulled out into the street.
A glance at the clock told her that it was 1:52. If she didn’t get a move on, she was going to be late.

Would Castellano be waiting for her at the lighthouse? Or someone else? The voice on the phone had said someone would be in touch. That could mean anyone.