Lethal (27 page)

She rejoined him at the table. “Hamilton has no right to interfere. Of course the man has an outrageous ego.”

“You’ve never even met him.”

“Based on everything you’ve told me about him, I doubt he could get his head through that door. It makes me mad as hell that he’s monitoring you.”

He decided against telling her that he wasn’t the only one in his office who had heard from Hamilton today. Many agents had disapproved of his appointment and had made no secret of it. But there were some who, either by word or general attitude, had demonstrated their support.

One of those agents, a data analyst, had confided in him today that others in the office had received calls from Hamilton. “For some reason,” she’d told Tom behind closed doors, “this case has showed up on Hamilton’s radar. He’s following it closely and asking questions about you.”

“What kind of questions?”

She had held up her hands, palms out. “I won’t get
involved in office politics, Tom. I need this job. But I thought you should know that you’re being scrutinized.”

Tom had thanked her. For the rest of the day, he sensed whispering behind his back. Which may only have been his paranoia, but he didn’t think so. He resented Hamilton’s intrusion. Whatever the reason for it, it was insulting and worrisome.

He pushed back his chair and stood up. “I’d better get back.”

He left the kitchen before the troubling conversation could continue. He washed up in the powder room and retrieved his briefcase from the den. Janice met him at the back door with a sack lunch. “Emergency relief in case you need it. Peanut butter crackers and an apple.”

“Thanks.”

She didn’t kiss him this time, and he didn’t kiss her. But before he could turn away, she placed her hand on his arm. “You’re doing a good job, Tom. Don’t let Hamilton or anyone else browbeat you into thinking otherwise.”

He gave her a weak smile. “I won’t. The hell of it is, Hamilton’s right.”

“In what way?”

“Any fool following this case would realize that it’s no ordinary kidnapping. In all likelihood, Mrs. Gillette witnessed Coburn shooting Fred Hawkins. Murderers don’t leave eyewitnesses. Coburn has a reason for keeping her alive.”

D
oral paid a dutiful visit to his mama.

As expected, she was prostrate with grief. Female relatives hovered around her, pressing her hands and applying damp cloths to her forehead. Rosary beads clacked as they prayed for Fred’s soul and petitioned for comfort for the loved ones he’d left behind.

There was no more room in the kitchen for all the food that had been brought by friends, family, and neighbors. The air-conditioning fought a losing battle against an approaching storm, which had lowered the barometric pressure and raised the humidity.

The male faction, to escape the drama inside the house, carried their overloaded plates out into the yard. They sat in lawn chairs, stroking the rifles and shotguns that lay across their laps, which was as second nature to them as scratching the ears of their hunting dogs. They passed around bottles of cheap whiskey and, in low voices, plotted revenge against Fred’s killer.

“He’d better hope the law catches up to him before I do,” said one uncle, a mean son of a bitch who’d lost an eye in Vietnam but could still outshoot most anybody, except possibly Doral.

“By this time tomorrow, I’ll have this Coburn’s balls in a Mason jar. See if I don’t,” vowed one cousin who was below the legal drinking age but was so drunk he was nearly falling off the tree stump on which he sat.

One of Doral’s younger brothers yelled at his rowdy kids, who were chasing each other in the yard. “Show some fucking respect!” he shouted, then pledged not to rest until Coburn was dead. “I don’t take kindly to people messin’ with our fam’ly.”

As soon as they’d eaten their fill and drunk the bottles dry, they piled into pickup trucks and set out to assigned territories to resume the search for their kinsman’s killer.

Doral said goodbye to his weeping mother, pulled himself free of her clammy, clutching hands, and left along with the rest, except that he went alone. Despite being half drunk, he easily navigated the winding back roads at a high rate of speed. He’d traveled these roads all his life and knew them intimately. He’d driven them a lot drunker than he was tonight. He and Fred. He and Eddie.

Thoughts of Eddie called to mind that fishing trip that had been captured in the framed photo that Crawford had bagged as evidence. Doral remembered that excursion as one of the best times the four of them had had together.

From thoughts of that day, his mind drifted to his fishing boat and his pre-Bookkeeper years. He and Fred had been born poor, and it had been an uphill struggle all their lives to make ends meet. Fred had sought financial stability by signing on with the police department. But wearing a
uniform, working a shift, wasn’t for Doral. He enjoyed flexibility.

He’d bought his boat on credit extended to him by a banker so tight-assed he squeaked when he walked. The rate of interest had been usurious, but Doral had never even been late on a payment.

Then for years he had run charters into the Gulf, putting up with groups of rich, drunken sons of bitches—doctors, lawyers, stockbrokers, and such—who thought of themselves as far above a fishing guide with callused hands and a Cajun accent. He had endured their verbal abuse, and their vomiting up their expensive booze, and their griping about the heat and the sun, rough seas, and uncooperative fish. He’d tolerated their crap because his livelihood had depended on it.

In a way, he’d been grateful to Katrina for destroying his boat and putting an end to it. No more kissing up to abusive assholes for Doral Hawkins, thank you very much.

That’s when The Bookkeeper had approached him and Fred with a moneymaking idea. The work was going to be a lot more exciting and lucrative than any enterprise they could have dreamed up on their own. Even in a state where taking graft was as commonplace as crawfish, the scheme was a way to get filthy rich.

Doral hadn’t shied away from the danger involved. The payoff was worth the risks. He liked walking a tightrope and enjoyed the inside joke of being a public official by day and something else entirely by night.

His job description was to intimidate, maim, or kill if necessary. He had a natural propensity for stalking and hunting, and now he could make a living at it. The only difference was that the prey was human.

So here he was speeding along back roads, his prey Lee Coburn. And his best friend’s widow and child.

When his cell phone rang, he slowed down only marginally in order to answer the call, but after hearing the urgent message the caller imparted, he floorboarded his brake pedal and skidded to a stop, sending up a cloud of dust that enveloped his car. “Are you shitting me?”

There was a lot of background noise, but the whispering caller made himself heard above it. Not that Doral wanted to hear anything of what he had to report.

“I thought you should know so you could pass it along to The Bookkeeper.”

“Thanks for nothing,” Doral muttered. He disconnected and pulled his car off the road, letting it idle on the edge of a ditch as he first lit a much-needed cigarette, then called The Bookkeeper.

He was stone cold sober now.

He skipped traditional greetings. “It’s rumored that Coburn is a federal agent.”

The Bookkeeper said nothing, just breathed slowly and deeply. Malevolently.

Doral, envisioning a seething volcano about to erupt, swiped at a bead of sweat rolling down his temple and into the outside corner of his eye.

“When did you hear this?”

“Ten seconds before I called you.”

“Who told you?”

“One of our plants in the P.D. He heard it from a feeb who’s working with them and the sheriff’s office on the kidnapping. The buzz is that Coburn is an agent who’s been working undercover.”

A long silence ensued. Then, “Well, as you so astutely pointed out this morning, he does seem unusually smart
for a dock worker. I only wish you had realized that before you let him escape the warehouse.”

Doral’s gut clenched as tight as a fist, but he didn’t say anything.

“What about Honor’s friend? Anything from her since you paid her a call this morning?”

“Tori hasn’t left her house. I honestly don’t think she’s heard from Honor or she wouldn’t be sitting tight. One thing I did find out, she’s got a new boyfriend. Bigwig banker in New Orleans name of Bonnell Wallace.”

“I know him. We’ve got money in that bank.”

“No shit? Well, I caught up with the health club’s bimbo receptionist at Subway when she went out for lunch. Made it look like a chance meeting. Schmoozed her, and it didn’t take much. She was only too happy to unload about Tori, who she referred to as a royal
B
with a capital letter, and that’s a quote.”

Doral was now breathing a little easier. He was pleased to have something positive to report following the rumor about Coburn. He hadn’t been idle today. He’d been proactive and was making progress. It was important that The Bookkeeper know that.

“The bimbo—her name’s Amber—her guess is that Wallace doesn’t want any of his banking customers or highfalutin friends to know he requires a personal trainer, so that’s why he started coming down here for his workouts. He’s got a fat belly, but a fatter purse. Tori was all over him in a New York minute. Sank her claws into him, and now he’s ga-ga. Tori is under the misconception that their affair is a secret, but all the employees know that it’s not just iron Mr. Bonnell Wallace is pumping whenever he comes to Tambour.”

After a lengthy silence, The Bookkeeper said, “Good
information to hold in reserve in case we need it. Unfortunately, it hasn’t moved you any closer to locating Coburn, has it?”

“No.”

“You and Fred left us with a mess, Doral. At a time when we least need a mess. No matter what Coburn is, he should have been killed along with the others. I haven’t forgotten who let him get away. Find him. Kill him. Don’t disappoint me again.”

The cheap whiskey surged into the back of Doral’s throat, scalding and rancid. He gargled it down. “How were Fred and I to know—”

“It’s your business to know.” The Bookkeeper’s tone of voice sliced to the bone, silencing any excuses Doral might have made. And just in case the message hadn’t quite sunk in, The Bookkeeper added, “You’ve heard me speak highly of Diego and his razor.”

Goosebumps broke out on Doral’s sweat-dampened arms.

“The only problem with using Diego is that it’s over too quickly for the person who failed me. He doesn’t suffer long enough.”

Doral barely made it out of his car before throwing up in the roadway.

H
onor was stunned to realize that Coburn seriously planned to move her father’s shrimp trawler.

Her protests fell on deaf ears.

Within minutes of hanging up on Hamilton, Coburn was in the wheelhouse, flinging back the tarp that had been placed over the control panel. “Do you know how to start the engine?” he asked impatiently, motioning to the controls.

“Yes, but we’d have to get it into the water first, and we can’t do that.”

“We’ve got to. We gotta relocate.”

Several times over the next hour she tried to convince him that it was an impossible project, but Coburn wouldn’t be deterred. He found a rusty machete in a toolbox on deck and was using it to whack at the fibrous vegetation that clung to the hull. It was backbreaking work. Once again she tried to dissuade him.