Envy the Night (27 page)

The blond woman, Renee, was staring Ezra in the eye, their faces separated only by the length of her arm and the gun.

“What I’m saying is, the way things are developing, y’all are going to need your bullets,” Ezra said. “Hate to see you waste one on me.”

“Maybe if I took out my gun and set it down,” Frank said, his voice loud, and he made the slightest motion with his arm. It was enough, as he’d hoped it
would be. She looked at him instead of squeezing the trigger as she’d promised, and when she did Ezra snapped his head sideways and his arm moved with the speed of a whip, laced up and then down and then Renee’s hand was in his own and her gun was pointed at the ground. Frank had the Smith & Wesson out by the time that was done.

“Damn, son,” Ezra said. “You think you’d have gotten that out fast enough if she
didn’t
look your way?”

“Felt pretty sure she would.”

“Me, too, but I was a little less excited about testing the theory. Always the man with the gun in his eye who’s the bigger fan of patience, though.”

He said all this with the casual delivery of a man in a barber’s chair, working the gun out of Renee’s fingers as he talked.

“Now, we got lots of guns around, everybody noticed that? Way too many guns. I’m thinking it’d be nice to put ’em all away, every one, and then just do some talking. Hell, this porch is nice enough. Let’s have us a seat out here, enjoy the day.”

He stepped back when he had possession of her gun, put it into his waistband, and motioned at the porch. She hadn’t moved throughout all of this, seemingly hadn’t
blinked
, just stood there and held his eyes with a stare so cold it seemed like it could pass through Ezra and carry out to the lake, put a skim of ice on the water.

“I could have killed you, and I didn’t,” she said. “Now let’s see if that was a mistake.”

She turned from him, walked to an old wooden bench beside the door, and sat down. Vaughn sat beside her and reached for her arm, but she shrugged away from his touch and slid to the other end of the bench.

“All right,” she said. “Talk.”

“I think that’s
your
job,” Nora said. The sound of her voice surprised Frank; hell, it seemed to surprise everyone. She’d been so still and quiet it was as if they’d forgotten her presence. When they all turned to look at her, she met the stares with a shrug.

“What? We didn’t come out here to tell them who
we
are. We’re not the ones responsible for getting good, innocent people killed. I want to hear
their
story, not mine.” She jabbed a finger at Renee and Vaughn.

Renee looked at Nora for a long time, as if she were intrigued. Frank tried to guess her age, and couldn’t. She had the body of a young woman, but her face carried some lines and her eyes were those of someone older. Or were they just tired?

“Where are the police?” she said. “You found us, so why not tell them to come out here and ask the questions?”

“It wasn’t my idea,” Nora answered, “but I listened to it.”

Renee nodded as if that made sense, then turned to Ezra. “You’re really the caretaker? You’re how these two found us?”

“Yes.”

“Then your name is Ezra.”

“Uh-huh.”

She nodded. “I’ve heard about you.”

“From Devin,” Ezra said, and Frank felt an unpleasant tingle at the sound of the name. “Where is he?”

“Dead,” she answered.

Frank and Ezra had agreed the previous night that they wouldn’t share any information at first, just hear the story as these two were prepared to tell it. Now, after hearing Renee proclaim her husband dead, Ezra merely nodded in Frank’s direction.

“You don’t know young Frank, I take it?”

Renee turned her cool gaze to Frank and searched his face. He was standing about five feet from her. She shook her head.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know who he is.” Talking as if she and Ezra were the only people on the porch.

“Last name of Temple,” Frank said. “That help you any?”

Vaughn looked from one to the other with confusion on his face, but Renee got it.

“Your father,” she said. “Devin and your father—”

“Killed people together.”

“The way I heard it, that wasn’t a joint project.”

“Then you heard it wrong,” he said. “And allow me to be the first to congratulate you on Devin’s demise. You’re better off with him gone. Everybody is.”

She came up off the bench in a smooth, fast motion and slapped him in the face. The sound of the blow made Vaughn step toward them, hands out, but he didn’t touch anyone. Nora made a soft sound of surprise, and Ezra just stood there and watched. Frank took the slap and looked down at Renee with his cheek stinging, didn’t say a word.

“Now that we got the greetings out of the way,” Ezra said, “maybe we ought to talk about the people who are still alive, sort out things with the dead at another time. Seems that you two have led a pair of unfriendly types into the area. Some innocent people suffered as a result. I think it’s time to hear what it’s all about.”

The woman stood where she was for a long time, staring at Frank, challenging him to say another harsh word about her husband. He had none. His mind was too occupied by what that slap meant, by the way she’d risen so fast to defend Devin. It was not the action of a woman who’d wanted him dead. The idea he’d had, then, that they would come out to this island and meet with the two people who’d put bullets into Devin’s back, no longer seemed to be the case. The reality had just spun away from the expectation, driven by the palm of her hand against his face. He looked at her and felt the tingle on his cheek, the heat of the blow fading into cold needles, and with it the truth he’d wanted.

“I’ll tell you what it’s all about,” Vaughn said as Renee finally turned and stalked back toward the bench, “it’s about
these
two innocent people”—he waved his hand between Renee and himself—“suffering for Devin’s mistakes.”

“Explain,” Ezra said.

“You know about Devin, you know what he does.”

“Right,” Ezra said, “but what do
you
do?”

Vaughn leaned forward on the bench, ducked his head so his eyes were hidden.

“I work—
worked
—at a prison in Florida. I’d been at it for about twelve years when I met Devin. Or when he approached me, would be a better way of saying it. I’d done the job right until then, too. I had.”

“Because nobody had ever offered him any money before then,” Renee said, and the scorn in her voice seemed to drop Vaughn’s head even lower.

“What did he pay you for?” Ezra said. “Smuggling to people on the inside?”

“Right idea,” Vaughn said, “wrong direction.”

“You were taking something
out
of the prison?”

“Instructions,” Frank said. This made sense already, had since Grady’s call the night before. “He was a postman, Ezra. A messenger. For Manuel DeCaster.”

An image of a newspaper photograph was trapped in Frank’s mind, a picture of DeCaster as he was led out of the courthouse on the eve of a guilty verdict. The man’s sallow, jailhouse skin was contorted into a sneer of contempt. He looked nothing like a man whose world had crumbled, and more like an emperor amused by the weak efforts of peasants hoping to overthrow him. And why not? With men like Devin Matteson to handle business on the outside and men like Vaughn to carry the messages, maybe his rule hadn’t been all that interrupted by steel bars and block walls and barbed wire.

“Yes,” Vaughn said. “Manuel DeCaster.”

“The big boss,” Ezra said, his voice dropping into an even slower drawl. “So
Devin recruited you to work as the messenger, keep DeCaster in touch with the outside world in ways that monitored phone calls and visits could not.”

“That was the idea,” Vaughn said.

“I understand how that could have brought some trouble down around you,” Ezra said, “but these boys that followed you into Tomahawk, they aren’t the police sort of trouble.”

“No.”

“So who are they?”

“They work for DeCaster. I don’t know how they found us.”

“You left them an easy trail,” Frank said. “There was a tracking device in your car. That’s how they got here, and I’m wondering when they had a chance to put it on your vehicle.”

Vaughn stared at Frank in confusion, mouth half open, but Renee Matteson lifted her hands to her temples, eyes going wide and then squeezing shut.

“What?” Frank said.

“I should have remembered,” she said. “Damn it, I should have remembered.”

“You knew about the device?” Ezra said.

She shook her head. “No. Well, not specifically, but I knew they’d been following him. A long time ago, Devin was following him.”

“Devin was
following
me?”

“At first,” she said, nodding, “he wanted to be sure he could trust you. Wanted to know what you were doing, where you were going. I didn’t think about there being a device on the car, and that was so long ago . . . that was a year ago . . . and it was
Devin,
not the bastards who shot him.”

“But they would have known about it,” Frank said. It made sense. Devin and the rest of DeCaster’s team would have wanted to follow Vaughn at first, make sure there were no covert meetings with cops, no betrayals.

“How many of them are there?” Renee asked.

“Two that we know of,” Frank said, thinking that this changed everything, made Devin’s role less important, the whole thing less personal. If these two were hiding from DeCaster’s crew, then it was no mystery why Devin had fled from the hospital. His survival odds were better on the run than inside, waiting for someone to come by and finish the job. This was bad, very bad. Stepping into the middle of a personal vendetta between Devin and these two was one thing. Stepping into the middle of a power struggle that ran back to Manuel DeCaster was a damn death sentence.

“Two that you know of? Well, there will be more than that if they call for help,” Vaughn said.

“All right,” Ezra said. “So we got some bad boys and big troubles. Everybody pretty well understood that. You’re dancing, though. I asked what it was you did to attract this. Haven’t heard that one answered.”

“I didn’t do shit. Devin, he got his eyes on the throne. The longer Manuel sat in a cell, the cockier Devin got. He started talking about what he could do on his own, talking about eliminating people closest to Manuel, starting with his cousins, who were key to the whole operation, guys who are so damn mean that when you look at them—”

“Slow down,” Ezra said, “and just tell us what happened. It ain’t that hard.”

Vaughn took a deep breath and ran a hand through his hair, completely avoiding Renee’s hard gaze.

“I’m
trying
to tell you what happened. You want it in two sentences or something? Fine, here you go: Devin was going to kill DeCaster’s cousins and two other guys, Cubans who were involved with him. He wanted a housecleaning.”

“And this had what to do with you?”

“He needed someone to lie to DeCaster. You know, tell him that one thing was happening while something else really was, and work it the other way, too, get the information he needed.”

“You agreed.”

“It was a lot of dollars.”

“Someone smelled it out?” Frank said. “Killed Devin before he made his play?”

“Yes. Then they came for me, and Renee. Still
are
coming for us, I guess.”

Ezra was looking hard at Frank, a question in his eyes, and Frank met the gaze and shook his head ever so slightly. Ezra frowned but broke the stare. Frank knew what he was wondering—whether they should tell these people that Devin was alive—and he wasn’t ready to do that. Not yet. There were too many questions here, too many possibilities and problems and angles, a dizzying new scenario appearing. And a disappointing one. Frank felt that in the pit of his stomach, a hard ache of disappointment. He’d come out here hoping to align himself with these two and against Devin, see it boil down to the type of finale he’d wanted for so long. That wasn’t going to happen, though. There was still a chance that Devin was headed this way, but he wouldn’t be arriving with vengeance on his mind. Rather, he’d be on the run. Same as these two.

“Why Renee?” Nora said, breaking the silence that had gathered. “If Devin’s dead, what’s the point of killing his wife?”

“Renee was around a lot,” Vaughn said. “She knows things that could hurt
them, hurt DeCaster. So do I. Now that they know Devin violated their trust, they’ll try to clean up the mess that surrounded him. Besides, they killed her husband. If anyone in the world is motivated to try to hurt these guys by going to the police, it’s Renee.”

Nora turned to Renee. “Then why
don’t
you go to the police? This guy and your husband are the ones that did something wrong.”

Renee smiled at her, and there was genuine warmth in it, something that Frank hadn’t been able to imagine on her face until then.

“I lived with Devin for nine years. You have any idea the things I know that the police would
love
to hear?”

The explanation didn’t seem to satisfy Nora, but Frank understood what she did not: Renee’s world was one in which cops were the enemy. Her husband’s death—the death she believed in, at least—wouldn’t change that outlook. Cops were to be feared and never trusted. It didn’t make sense until you’d spent a decade or so living with that worldview.

“We’d been here just one day,” Vaughn said, “when I left to get some food, supplies. I was coming back from that when Frank here hit my car.”

Frank didn’t want to hear him return to that, didn’t want anyone dwelling on the incredible coincidence of Frank hitting this guy’s car, a guy who just happened to be with Devin’s wife. The longer people thought about a coincidence like that, the more unreasonable it seemed, and he wasn’t quite ready to explain to Renee that he’d really come up here intending to kill her husband.

“Why did you come here?” Ezra said, and for a moment Frank thought the question was directed at him, that Ezra had somehow stepped inside his thoughts. Then he realized he was asking Renee.

“It’s what Devin told Vaughn to do,” Renee said.

Vaughn nodded. “Right before he got killed, he was getting worried about things, told me that if anything happened I needed to get Renee out fast. He told me to bring her here, because nobody else knew it existed. Nobody down there, at least.”