Reckoning and Ruin (3 page)

Chapter Five

Trey always slept deeply, even without a dose of oxy in his system. His mouth softened and his forehead unwrinkled, smoothing the furrow that deepened between his eyebrows when he was annoyed or frustrated or confused.

I lay on the bed face to face with him, ran my fingers through his hair. “Trey?”

No response. I stroked his forehead, heard the deeper inhale, the interrupted rhythm of respiration. After a few seconds, his eyes fluttered open.

“Hey,” I said.

He licked his lips. “Hey.”

“You coherent?”

“What?”

“Guess not.” I propped up on my elbow. “How's the shoulder?”

“Better.”

He smelled like menthol and shea butter, and the skin on his neck was still cool from the ice pack. His eyes were half-lidded, his voice slurred with painkillers and sleep.

“Trey?”

“Hmmm?”

“I need to ask you a question.”

“A what?”

“A question. About the investigator from Ainsworth Lovett's office. Marisa said you'd made an appointment with him on Monday.”

“With who?”

“Finn Hudson. The PI who works for Jasper's new attorney. You're meeting with him on Monday.”

He shook his head. “No, no. That was blue.” Then he closed his eyes again.

I sighed. Gabriella was right. He was totally useless. I pushed myself up, but he reached over and tangled his hand in my hair, running his fingers deep into the curls. There was something about my hair that enraptured him. Sometimes I woke up to find he'd wrapped one finger around a tendril at the nape of my neck, closing it into his fist like a keepsake.

“Come to bed,” he said.

“In a minute. I need to do something first.”

“So come to bed now, then come to bed in a minute.”

I shook my head at him, amused despite my frustration. “You're not making any sense.”

“Of course I am.”

He ran his thumb along my bottom lip, his touch so light I felt shivers racing across my skin, like a breeze stirring up still water. This was his prime tactic for seduction, the almost innocent caress. Never overt, always an invitation. Always irresistible.

“You're supposed to be taking it easy,” I said.

“This is easy,” he whispered, rolling to his back. “Very very easy.”

I straddled his hips, careful of the injured shoulder as he stretched out underneath me, warm and willing. Half submission, half seduction, total surrender—to me, to desire, to the languid, oxy-hazed pleasure of the moment. I bent to kiss him, my hair falling in a curtain around us.

As it turned out, Gabriella was wrong. He wasn't
totally
useless.

***

I left him in the tangle of bedsheets, slipping his shirt over my head as I went to his desk. I flicked on the reading lamp, and it made a warm circle against the shadows of the living room. The black furniture and blank white walls always seemed so stark without Trey. He provided a flesh and blood beating heart in what was otherwise a hollow space, as empty as a vacuum.

I sat in his chair and got a mechanical pencil and yellow pad from the top drawer. There were no places in the apartment off limits to me, the whole of his present life open. And yet there was the whole of his past, a vast unknown territory. Trey had instructed my brother to turn over his entire psychological profile to me, to help me understand the intricacies of his brain, but the MRIs and cognitive reports hadn't revealed who he'd been before, the Trey that Garrity and Gabriella knew and loved and missed.

I shook off the unsettled feeling, switched on Trey's computer, and looked up Ainsworth Lovett's website. I printed off pages of it, mostly FAQs and explanations of terms, and then started collecting articles on his past cases. The more I read, the more I understood why Jasper appealed to him—the good lawyer had a taste for tabloid fodder.

His previous client list was a roster of sadism. The LaSalle brothers, accused of killing their parents and feeding their remains to the family koi collection. The Boxing Day Bomber, a quasi-terrorist who'd blown up a rec center the day after Christmas. The San Diego Succubus, accused of sleeping with and murdering five men, every single one slaughtered in the bed she'd lured them to.

And now he'd sicced his investigator on Garrity and Trey. Not me, not yet anyway. But my politely threatening letter was coming, that was certain, was perhaps already at the shop, waiting for me.

I slumped back in the chair. I'd thought I was almost done with Jasper Boone. My first cousin. My most frequent nightmare.

When we were little, I'd spent countless afternoons with him and his brother Jefferson, the three of us playing hide-and-seek in their marshland backyard. We were all three tow-headed, tanned as dark and supple as leather, running buckwild while our parents drank whiskey sours on the deck and watched the sun melt over the Wilmington River.

Their mother was my mother's younger sister, who abandoned Uncle Boone and the boys the summer I entered middle school. My family abruptly stopped visiting soon after. I never understood why, only that this fell into the category of “grown-up reasons” and that there was no bending them.

I eventually learned it had something to do with the underbelly of my uncle's successful marina, which not only made a good respectable living, but also channeled its fair share of marijuana and moonshine and illegal tobacco into the Lowcountry. My parents had been well-off in the gated community way, but Boone had been rich in the twenty-acre private waterfront estate way. And despite the cold war my parents had decreed, I secretly visited his place almost every weekend during my late teenage years, usually sneaking home some moonshine in a Mason jar.

Until Boone went to prison for manslaughter, the result of a bar fight gone bad wrong. Until his membership in the KKK came out. He underwent a prison redemption, as they say, seeing the errors of his racist ways and denouncing his former associates. He didn't repent of his other criminal activities, however, which was why he went to prison the second time, getting out early thanks to an incurable lung condition and compassionate parole. IPF, the diagnosis said. Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.

My parents were dead now, but Beauregard Forrest Boone, once upon a time the most dangerous man in Chatham County, was still alive, though we hadn't spoken since that night in the fall, barely five months ago. What was there to say? His own son had tried to kill him, and his other son too. How could we even begin to talk about that?

The memories of that rain-slashed night were vivid still, though. Trey and Jasper and me…and Hope. She was the fourth player in that final act, a vital witness currently serving time at the Chatham County Detention Center for her own crimes. We had complicated history, Hope and I, and I'd bid good riddance to her. But if Lovett was stirring up the pot, then I knew I'd have to talk to her again. Back to Savannah, back to all the hungry ghosts haunting its shadows and stones.

I threw down the letter and lowered my head to the desk.

Not again.

I didn't think I could do it again.

Chapter Six

The next morning Trey woke up groggy and still in pain, but not quite as edgy. This happy state lasted until he talked to Marisa. I shimmied into khaki pants while he paced in front of the terrace doors, cell phone to his ear.

“No, an appointment written in
blue
means I need to update you on something. An appointment in
red
is for face-to-face meetings…. But I wasn't meeting Hudson, I was meeting
you
to inform you…well, actually yes, that
did
seem like something that could wait until Monday, hence my putting it on the calendar for then.”

I pulled on the white long-sleeved shirt that completed my official shop uniform, deciding to skip the sneakers and go for the heavy-duty work boots. I'd be in-field all day with both infantry and cavalry units, which meant the staging area would be a slop of churned mud and horse manure. I was not going to come out of the day smelling—or looking—like a rose.

Trey shook his head. “Of course I wouldn't schedule a meeting without approving it with you, which is…why would I need a color key on my own desk calendar?”

The conversation continued in this vein for several more minutes. I checked my phone. Another text from my helper Kenny, the third that morning, saying that he'd arrived at the shop and had his truck almost loaded. It was his first time prepping by himself, and he was consumed with the jitters. I wasn't worried. Kenny knew the shop's on-location routine, especially set-up and takedown, and he'd been active in the reenactment community since he was a toddler. Plus he was nineteen, with a nineteen-year-old's energy.

Trey exhaled loudly. “Of course. I understand. I'll have it for you by five.”

He hung up. He was still wearing the workout pants and tee shirt he'd put on before he'd been forced to admit a morning run was beyond his capabilities. He could pace, however, and so he did, like a tin soldier wound far too tight. I was still worried about his shoulder, worried enough to want to stay home, but a teensy part of me couldn't wait to get out the door. He'd been nothing but complaints and thwarted energy since he'd gotten out of bed at six, as usual. When he got in such a mood, he was
not
a pleasant companion.

I pulled on a boot. “What does Marisa want by five?”

“A 302 on Ainsworth Lovett.”

Phoenix code for an information report. I'd had to fill out one for every extracurricular event I'd involved Trey in that somehow also involved Phoenix. I'd created 302s on car chases and boat chases, skulls and reticulated pythons. They felt old hat to me now.

“I assume you're doing this from home since you can't drive,” I said.

“I can access the Phoenix data bases remotely, but to get a full background, I need to access LINX, and to do that, I need to be at the field office, and I can't do that until Monday.” He threw himself in his desk chair, drummed his fingers on a legal pad. “You said Garrity had heard nothing from the Savannah detective on the case, correct?”

“Yep.”

“Or from the prosecutor?”

“Yep again. But I'm not surprised. Savannah Metro is fruit-basket turnover right now—new police chief, new recruits, new procedures, all of them pushing that whole “racist bad cops in an underground militia” stink as far away from themselves as possible. If they could mash a button and make Jasper and all his co-defendants go poof, they would.”

Trey had a mechanical pencil in hand now, beating a steady tap-tap-tap against the wood, and he was spinning the chair in a tight arc, back and forth. I recognized the look in his eye. Perseveration was the clinical term, but it meant that once Trey caught the scent of something, he became incapable of dropping it. It wasn't all due to the accident—Garrity's stories of the pre-TBI Trey revealed an individual with a sharpened sense of focus, an extreme talent at concentrating. It had served him well as a sniper, and it served him well now, even if it stuck in high gear sometimes.

I stood up. “Regardless, nothing's happening today. So stop…oh heck, hang on.”

I pulled my phone out of my pocket and sighed. Kenny. I put the phone to my ear, but he started jabbering before I could even say hello.

“Miss Tai! I can't find the tent!”

I pressed a hand against my forehead. “Crap. I forgot. Raymond Junior across the square borrowed it for some party he's having at the restaurant.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Bring the back-up tent.”

“But—”

“And bring the mail! Don't forget the mail! Even if you forget the tent, don't forget the mail!”

“But—”

“You'll be fine. I have faith in you, Kenny.”

I hung up before he could work himself into a lather. I propped a hip on the edge of Trey's desk. He was staring out the window, tapping the pencil, two seconds from lather himself.

“Was there a letter?” he said.

“I don't know. I'll check when I get there and call you back.”

“You should have asked him now. I need to put that information in the report. You should have—”

“No, no, no. We are not doing this.” I put my hands on his shoulders and looked him square in the eye. “You are grumpy as hell, and there is not a thing I can do about it. And if I don't get out of here, I am going to grumpy up too. And then it will be the OK Corral of grumpiness, and neither of us will walk away unbloodied from that.”

He narrowed his eyes. “A point.”

“I will call when I get there. And then I'm going to watch the Blue and the Gray pummel each other. And you are going to take some more oxycodone, wash it down with that nasty anti-inflammatory tea Gabriella left, and lie down with the ice pack. And then maybe, just maybe, you and I can have a civilized conversation when I get back. Deal?”

He started to fold his arms, then winced. “No, it is not a deal. I have a 302 due by five today.”

“Lucky for you, you've got a proactive girlfriend.” I pointed to his desk. “Everything I could find on Lovett and his investigator, printed and stapled and tucked into folders. All it needs is a summary and some collating, and you've got a fine Phoenix-worthy information report.” I took a deep breath. “So go back to sleep, okay? And then I'll come back and rub some liniment into that shoulder and we'll have a nice quiet dinner, just the two of us. How's that?”

His expression softened the tiniest bit, and he mumbled something that I was going to take for acquiescence. I pulled the pencil from his fingers and tossed it on the desktop, then pointed toward the bedroom. He heaved a sigh of protest.

But he went.

Chapter Seven

I was late, thanks to an overturned truck full of crab legs right before my exit. It was on fire when I got there, and had three lanes blocked and all of I-85 smelling like a Red Lobster. I was running when I got to my spot outside the reenactment field where the various sutlers set up shop. The kettle-corn guy was already selling his wares, his giant copper cauldron fired up like the noonday sun, the smell of sugar and oil heavy on the morning air.

Kenny waited behind the table, trying desperately to keep everything from blowing away. He was dressed in his butternut infantry uniform, his kepi covering his short brown hair, his glasses falling halfway down his nose. Today's skirmish wasn't a reenactment of any particular importance—on this April morning one hundred and fifty years ago, the Confederacy was slouching its bloodied and disgruntled way toward surrender at Appomattox Court House—but I didn't want him to miss muster.

“I'm here, I'm here, I'm here!” I threw myself behind the table. “Did everybody get their pick-ups?”

The wind riffled up a pile of shop pamphlets, and Kenny slammed a hand on top of them. “Yes, ma'am. Except for Mr. Reynolds. He insisted on waiting for you, as usual.”

Reynolds Harrington liked any excuse to play Rhett Butler to my…well, not Scarlett O'Hara, for sure. But Reynolds liked a female foil, and I was the best he could get this morning.

I thunked a plastic bin of antique bullets on top of the pamphlets. “Did you remember to bring the mail?”

“Yes, ma'am. I left it in the back of the truck so's—”

I hurried to his truck and flung open the gate. And then I froze. Smack dab in the middle of the tee-shirts sat a bouquet of red roses. They were the color of heartblood, rich and velvety, and the cut crystal vase fractured the morning light into yellow-white shards.

I felt the first whirl of vertigo. “Kenny? Where did these come from?”

“They came to the shop after you left yesterday. But you gave me strict orders not to call you last night unless it was an emergency, and roses weren't, so I kept them safe until today.”

I'd been waiting for this shoe to drop, for my mysterious stalker to make contact again. I'd been expecting another photograph, though, or a mysterious letter written in code. Not roses.

I peered among the petals. “Did you see who brought them? Was there a card? You didn't touch them, did you?”

“Miss Tai—”

“There might be fingerprints. They can get DNA from fingerprints now, and—”

“Miss Tai, I swear it's like you never got flowers before.” Kenny plucked the card from the leaves and extended it my way. “They're from Mr. Trey.”

I blinked at him and accepted the card. There was Trey's signature, in that proper Palmer method handwriting he'd learned in Catholic school. I felt a blush rising, and a squirmy ripple of pleasure.

Kenny noticed both. “Aw, that's sweet, right there.”

“Yeah yeah yeah.” I slipped the card in my back pocket. “So where's the mail?”

Kenny pointed. I snatched it up, yanked off the rubber band, and sifted through it. Sure enough, there was a letter from Ainsworth Lovett's office. I ripped it open and pulled out the triple-folded paper, skimming it quickly.

It was the same letter Garrity and Trey had gotten, and just like theirs, this Finn Hudson person wanted to interview me. Right. Like I had anything to share with someone trying to defend that son of a bitch who'd tried to murder me and mine. I crumpled the letter into a ball and threw it back in the truck, then pulled out my cell phone to call Trey.

A booming voice came at me from behind. “Tai Randolph, you are tardy!”

I turned around and popped my hands on my hips. “Reynolds Harrington, I told you about sneaking up on me!”

The man behind the voice was short and round, with silver hair falling across his forehead. He had a neatly trimmed beard and eyes like a satyr and an unlit cigar champed between his teeth. He'd been a charmer in his day, back when “wealthy scion” counted as a respectable career option. Now, after his sister's death, he was the head of the Harrington Foundation, charged with preserving the finest private collection of Civil War relics in the Southeast.

He took my hand in his, pressed a kiss to my knuckles. “You are a vision, m'dear.”

“And you are a liar.” I gave him the up and down. “And a Yankee to boot. You got galvanized, I see.”

“The Union side needed a few good men, so today my impression will be of Federal infantryman Lance Henry Harrington—no relation—who first fought with the Illinois 86th Infantry in Chickmauga, honing my martial skills in Buzzard Roost and Snake Gap Creek before taking a Minié ball to the chest.”

“So you die today?”

“Alas, I am doomed to perish on the field of glory.” He scrutinized me. “Why don't you ever wear a nice dress like the other young ladies? A pretty calico, maybe a gingham?”

I laughed. “I'm doing an impression of a woman impersonating a Confederate infantryman.”

He dropped his eyes to my chest. “Female infiltrators usually bound their chests to disguise their…ah…assets.”

“There's not enough gauze in the metro area to disguise these assets.”

I reached into the back of the truck and unwrapped Reynold's latest purchase—a genuine Confederate cavalry saber, quite possibly a Froelich, which made it easily worth the five grand he'd paid for it. That he was neither cavalry nor Confederate today bothered him not one whit.

I slipped the belt around his ample waist, cinched the buckle. “Quick question before the bugle—what do you know about Ainsworth Lovett?”

“Idealistic liberal from an old-money conservative family. Takes on the scandalous cases no decent lawyer would touch, mostly to piss off said family. Why do you ask?”

“He's Jasper's new lawyer. And his investigator is trying to set up an interview with me and Trey.”

“Well now, that
is
a game changer.” He sheathed his weapon in its matching scabbard. “Are you ready to dig around in that again?”

“Ready or not, I'm about to start.”

The bugle sounded, calling him to arms. “Lovett is picky in his clientele. He prefers them rich and headline-making, but every now and then he signs up a less-than-wealthy client if he thinks the case is especially horrifying.”

“Pro bono?”

Reynolds snorted. “Hardly, though he will work on a contingency basis, I have heard. How does a miscreant like Jasper Boone come about such funds, or the promise of such thereof?”

“You're hitting the same question I have. You haven't seen any odd transactions in the relic trade, have you?”

He shook his head. Reynolds bought and sold on a higher plane than I did, up in the five-and-six-figure stratosphere. I specialized in tracking down specific single pieces, but he saw extensive collections come up for private auction. And he knew as well as I did that well-moneyed, well-connected racists were often the buyers or sellers. If Jasper had indeed found some white supremacist movement besides the KKK to be his savior, liquidating a few old relics might provide some hard cash.

“I'll send out some feelers come Monday and let you know what I find,” he said. He fixed me with a watery, but dead serious eye. “As you know, such organizations as we are speaking of are not charities. Jasper would have to have something to offer them in return besides his undying loyalty.”

“That's what I'm afraid of.” I adjusted the hang of his scabbard. “There. Once more into the breach. Fingers crossed things turn out differently for you this time, Private Harrington.”

He bowed low, sweeping his hat. “Ah, m'dear, I suspect things will play out exactly as they have before. They always do.”

***

I remembered his words after the melee, when the sun finally set on the battle and the last pick-up trucks growled away, the last picnickers with them. I did most of the clean-up myself while Kenny engaged in the post-battle rundown with his unit. The morning air had been heated into starchy afternoon stillness, but a graying sky and the kick-up of fresh wind meant rain was on the way, so I didn't tarry.

I'd packed the last box when an unfamiliar man stepped up to my counter, bare now of any goods. His khaki shorts and black tee were clean, his pale face unstriped with dirt or grass. He wore his black cap low on his forehead, the brim obscuring his eyes, and there was something off about him. Not a reenactor, not a spectator, not a fellow sutler from one of the other shops.

“Tai Randolph?” he said.

“Yes?”

“Owner and proprietor of Dexter's Guns and More?”

“Yes.” I kept my expression blandly professional. “Can I help you with something?”

“Yes, you can.” He pushed the cap back, his pale eyes penetrating, uncomfortably so. He got a good long look at me, then handed over a large manila envelope. “You can consider yourself officially served.”

I ripped open the envelope and dumped the contents on my table. I started to feel sick to my stomach, and then the nausea ripened into ripping pure anger. Suddenly, I knew where Jasper thought he was going to get the money for his extravagant new defense.

I shoved the envelope and its contents away and looked up. “You can tell that lousy waste of oxygen who sent you that—”

But the man had vanished.