Ron Base - Sanibel Sunset Detective 01 - The Sanibel Sunset Detective (24 page)

The handwriting was the same. As he knew it would be.

His cell phone buzzed.

“I need to see you,” said the voice of Elizabeth Traven.

34

R
ain, unaccustomed rain, poured down on Sanibel-Captiva. The Beetle’s windshield wipers were helpless against the onslaught. The little car shuddered and shook in the wind, like an old dog afraid of the storm. Tree leaned over the wheel, trying to see the road in front of him. He pulled onto the shoulder and called Freddie.

“We just got in,” Freddie said. “Were you here?”

“A few minutes ago,” Tree said.

“Where are you now?”

“On my way to Elizabeth Traven’s.”

A pause before Freddie said, “Is that a good idea?”

“I’m not sure what is or is not a good idea at this point. I’m a little concerned about what’s happening. Can you get Marcello out of there for the time being?”

“You think that’s necessary?”

“Humor me, okay? At least for tonight, until I get to the bottom of a couple of things.”

“Go to the police, Tree.”

“I’ve just been talking to the police. I’m not sure how helpful they are going to be. For now I’d feel better if you weren’t at the house.”

“I guess I could take him over to Jill Stone’s place. She’s one of the assistant managers.”

“Did you quit your job?”

“Who told you that?”

“Apparently it’s all over the island.”

“I didn’t realize I was so famous.”

“Freddie.”

“Ray’s been on the phone. We’ve talked. I’m not sure what I’ve done. Right now, I’d better get Marcello out of here. We can talk about this later. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“Please, please, Tree. Please be careful.”

“Careful is my middle name.”

“Not any more,” Freddie said.

____

Tree parked at the side of the Traven house and then dashed through the rain up the steps. Elizabeth answered, barefoot, hair tangled, wearing a toga-like shift that didn’t fall past her thighs. The drink in her hand dispelled Tree’s initial thought of Phaedra, besotted with her stepson. More like Elizabeth, a little drunk and scared.

“Dwayne Crowley’s been released from jail,” she announced. He expected thunder to rumble.

“How did you hear?” Tree shut the door and followed her across the foyer.

“My husband called.” She raked her free hand through her hair. “He’s coming here. I just know it.”

Tree said, “The police know he’s out. They’ll keep an eye out for him.”

“Keep an eye out for him?” She sounded appalled. “You think the police are going to lift a finger to help me?”

She stared at him accusingly, as though he was responsible for the lack of police assistance. “Go into the other room,” she said. “I’ll come right back.”

Outside the big living room windows, nature mounted a sound and light show that could open in Vegas. He watched until he saw Elizabeth’s shifting reflection in the window.

She held a fresh drink in one hand, a gun in the other.

“What are you’re doing with that?” He wasn’t talking about the drink.

She thrust the gun into his hands, a .38 caliber revolver. He stared down at it. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

“You stupid bastard. You’re supposed to protect me with it.”

“I don’t know anything about guns.”

She put her drink down and came toward him, breasts moving beneath thin fabric. Her arms slipped around his neck.

“What are you doing?” was all he could think of to say before she kissed him. She tasted like whiskey.

In the detective novels he read as a kid, the hard-boiled private eye—Shell Scott, Mike Shayne, Mike Hammer—always resisted the femme fatales’s advances. Tree could never understand that. How could they resist these hot, compliant women? Why would they resist?

All these years later, a detective of sorts himself, and here he was resisting Elizabeth Traven, Captiva Island’s resident femme fatale, pushing her away, announcing in a lame voice, “I’m a married man.”

Elizabeth hit him. His nose exploded in blood. His glasses went flying. She pummeled him, blood spraying the carpet. He fell to the floor. She was on top of him, screaming unintelligibly, flailing haphazardly but nonetheless landing a few blows. He managed to grab her arms and swing her off, pinning her to the floor.

“You’re bleeding on me, you asshole.”

Straddling her, he let go of her arms so he could wipe his bleeding nose.

“Get off me you fool, get off.” She was weeping now, her face slick with her tears and his blood.

He fell away from her. She rose to her knees, body shaking with the force of her sobs.

Elizabeth stumbled to her feet, pulling at the hem of her shift, reaching for Kleenex in an elegant ivory case on a glass-topped coffee table. She threw a wad of tissues at him. They floated like pink kites. He grabbed a couple and held them to his nose. He saw his glasses on the floor, surrounded by bright red blood spots.

“You’ve got blood all over the carpet,” she said. “What kind of detective are you, anyway?”

“The kind that bleeds.”

He retrieved his glasses and then hoisted himself to his feet holding the tissues against his nose.

“What’s wrong with you? You can’t even be seduced.”

“What are you doing trying to seduce me?”

She flared angrily. “Why does anyone do it? Because they want to get laid. Don’t you know anything?”

“I don’t think you want to get laid, Elizabeth. Not by me, anyway.”

She dissolved into more tears.

“Hey, it’s okay,” he said. “I’m not very seducible these days.”

“You’re such an idiot,” she said between sobs. “Why do you think I hired you in the first place?”

“To have sex?”

She issued a derisive snort. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

She flopped onto a nearby easy chair, alternately pulling at the hem of her shift and brushing away tears. He offered her a tissue.

She blew her nose. He dabbed at his. The bleeding had pretty much stopped.

“We knew the boy had been to see you,” she said. “Do you understand? This was a way of getting you on side, that’s all it was.”

More sobs exploded out of her. He handed her another wad of tissue. “I’ve had too much to drink,” she said angrily. “I shouldn’t be talking like this.”

Her chin bobbed up and down. “I told my fool husband not to give you that money, that it wouldn’t change anything. Sure enough, it didn’t. So here we are tonight.”

“Where are we, Elizabeth? What are you talking about?”

She was sitting up, holding her head in her hands. “I don’t want you hurt, you or your wife. You’re just a couple of harmless idiots who stumbled into this.”

“I know that the woman I found, Dara Rait, she dealt in body parts. Mickey Crowley and Reno O’Hara are part of it. So was Mickey’s husband, Dwayne.”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said.

“Brand must have met Dwayne in prison. You hooked up with Mickey. Mickey brought in Dara Rait.”

Elizabeth lifted her head away from her hands. “We needed a liver, just part of a liver, actually.”

The penny dropped. “For Brand’s niece.”

“Hillary. To save her life. Marcello turned out to be the perfect match.”

“But Reno went crazy for some reason and killed Dara, and suddenly everything was a mess.”

“He thought she was cheating on him.”

“With Mel Scott?”

“I have no idea.”

“Marcello was scared of what they were going to do to him, so he ran away. He didn’t want an operation. He figured if he could find his real mom, everything would be all right. That’s when he came to me.”

“These people are worse than camp guards in the Gulag,” Elizabeth said. “After you found Dara’s body, I tried to get them to go away, but they wouldn’t listen. They are greedy and petty and ruthless. They won’t stop until it’s finished.”

“Until what’s finished?”

“The operation, for God’s sake! That’s what all this is about.” She staggered to her feet. “I should never have had so much to drink. God, what have I got myself into?”

He grabbed Elizabeth’s arm, twisting her around to face him. “What operation? They don’t have Marcello. How can there be an operation?”

“You fool. Don’t you get it yet? This is why you’re here. Dwayne’s at your place. He’s taking the boy.”

“Where? Where are they taking him?” His voice was high, angry. A voice he had not heard for a long time.

“It’s too late,” she mumbled. “You can’t stop them.”

“Where?”

She threw up her hands, an exhausted heroine in a dreadful stage melodrama playing to the last row in the house. “Some place near Fort Myers Beach. A mobile park. That’s all I know.”

Tree found the gun on the floor where he dropped it when she attacked him. He picked it up. “Is it loaded?”

“Of course it’s loaded,” she snarled. “What the hell good would it be if it wasn’t loaded?”

He stuck the gun in the belt under his shirt. It fit nicely, he thought as he went out into the rain, hurrying down the front steps. He hated to think in clichés such as his heart beat like a drum. But that’s what it was doing. He was a gun-toting detective on his way to save the love of his life, heart pounding.

At the bottom of the stairs Detective Mel Scott materialized out of the darkness. Tree came to a stop. “Am I glad to see you,” he said.

Scott stepped forward, placing his weight on one foot so that he could slam his fist into Tree’s stomach.

The breath went out of him. He sank to his knees in the rain, the gun falling out of his belt, clattering to the wet pavement.

“Look at that,” said Scott sarcastically. “Our hero detective is packing.”

Cee Jay Boone bent down and picked up the gun.

35

M
el Scott yanked Tree to his feet and together with Cee Jay Boone hustled him over to a nearby SUV and pushed him into the rear. Scott got in beside him, jamming a gun into his ribs while Cee Jay slipped behind the wheel and started the engine.

“Looks like Mel’s not working undercover after all,” Tree said.

Mel said, “Shut up.”

They shot out the front gate onto Captiva Road, the rain intensifying, the sound of beating windshield wipers punctuating the silence.

“Where are we going?” Tree managed to gasp between the spasms of pain shooting through his stomach.

“Shut up,” repeated Mel Scott. He rammed the gun harder into Tree’s ribs. Cee Jay glanced at the rearview mirror.

“I tried to warn you to stay out of this. You can’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“You warned me as in ‘stay out of this Tree, for your own safety.’ Not, ‘I’m a corrupt cop, Tree, and I will kill you if you get in my way.’ I might have listened to that.”

“Too bad for you asshole,” Mel growled.

“What I don’t understand is how a couple of supposedly street-smart cops like yourselves got mixed up with Reno and his gang of losers.”

Mel chuckled. “Pal, you really are new to the scene. Any time you’re involved with bad guys, by definition you are mixed up with losers. But sometimes the losers have the money. That’s what you’re after. You got to be a little smarter, that’s all.”

“I could be wrong,” Tree said. “But driving me through the rain with a gun in my ribs while Dwayne and Mickey kidnap Marcello and my wife, that doesn’t strike me as very smart.”

“Mel, shut him up,” said Cee Jay tightly, eyes glued to the road.

“Last time, shithead, keep quiet.”

“What are you going to do, Mel? Kill me?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m gonna do.”

Tree kept quiet.

____

In the darkness, Tree wasn’t sure where Cee Jay turned, but suddenly they swerved off onto a gravel roadway framed by low hedges. A lightning flash illuminated a grassy shoreline dipping into a shallow inlet. The car crunched to a stop. Cee Jay twisted around to Tree.

“Get out,” she said.

“What are you doing?”

“Telling you to get out of the car,” she said in a tense voice.

Mel Scott shoved him into the door, then reached across to pull at the handle. The door flew open, spilling Tree onto the roadway.

Tree was on his knees, realizing he’d lost his glasses. He groped in the darkness, panicky, desperate to find them. No luck. Cee Jay got out of the vehicle. Mel joined her, shining a flashlight at Tree. He raised a hand to deflect the glare.

Mel said, “See that boat over there, Tree? I want you to get on your feet and walk toward it.”

“I don’t see any boat,” Tree said.

“Tree, just do it,” Cee Jay said.

Tree got to his feet, his mind whirling, trying not to worry about lost glasses, concentrating on ways to save himself. He needed to be inventive. But he couldn’t think of a damned thing. He stood rooted to the spot in the rain until Mel delivered a stinging backhand.