Superstition (56 page)

For the first time since he’d started trying to reach her on her cell phone and she hadn’t answered, Joe relaxed enough to smile.

“Not necessarily off base. For all we know, something like that may have been the reason Tara Mitchell was killed. But it didn’t have anything to do with the Lazarus Killer. That was strictly Sid trying to disguise his murder of Karen Wise by playing the copycat game.”

“So it’s over.” Nicky let out a
whoosh
of relief. “I can’t believe it.”

“All except for the wrap-up.”

“THE WRAP-UP! Oh my God!” Nicky’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped open as she suddenly remembered that she was supposed to be live on the air at nine p.m., wrapping up the Lazarus Killer case. The good news was: Did she have a ratings-grabbing ending or what? The bad news was that the ending was that the show’s executive producer had just been arrested for multiple homicide. In that case, did the old showbiz maxim of “the show must go on” apply? “What time is it?”

“Seven-thirty-five.” Dave glanced at his watch.

“
O-kay.
Excuse me. I’ve got to make a phone call.” Pushing back her chair, Nicky jumped to her feet. Bad move. She went a little light-headed and had to grab the back of the chair for support. Then there was the small fact that her legs felt about as solid beneath her as limp noodles, and grabbing the chair had sent a sharp stab of pain through her wounded arm, but other than that, she was good to go.

Live at nine.

“Wait. Whoa. What are you doing?” Joe stood, too, looking at her as though he thought she’d lost her mind. “You’re on the injured list, remember? Sit down.”

“I will, if you go get my cell phone for me. It’s on the nightstand in your bedroom.”

His lips compressed, but he left the room, presumably to do as she’d requested, and she sat down again. He was back a minute later, handing it to her.

“Something I should know?” he asked.

She reminded him about the show, and he shook his head at her as she dialed Sarah Greenberg’s number.

“No way,” he said. “You can’t. You—”

Then she waved him to silence as Sarah answered.

By the time she finished explaining the situation to Sarah, who was floored over Sid’s involvement but increasingly professional as the news sank in, Dave had discreetly left the room and Joe was looking grim.

What Sarah said, basically, was what Nicky had known all along: The time slot between nine and ten was
Twenty-four Hours Investigates’
s to fill. They could rerun an existing taped show, of course, or Nicky could do a live update on the investigation, turning it into a news piece announcing Sid’s involvement and wrapping up the case.

That, they both agreed, would really be must-see TV.

They could still use the taped segments that she had planned to air, Nicky calculated, including the one they’d filmed that afternoon of her mother finding the tape, which was, of course, the catalyst to the case. How great would that be? They’d captured it live—well, live-on-tape.

“That’s what we’ll do, then,” Nicky said to Sarah, and disconnected.

“So?” Joe was looking at her out of narrowed eyes.

“So I’ve got to go. We’re on the air at nine.” Nicky stood up again. This time the room didn’t spin. Adrenaline had kicked in, and she knew she could do this. Everyone would already be on their way to the Old Taylor Place, she calculated. There was no time to arrange another venue. Anyway, that one would work. She could do everything she’d planned, then keep fifteen minutes or so at the end to describe the events of the afternoon—and announce the identity of the Lazarus Killer.

Yes.

“You’re actually going through with this program?” He sounded incredulous. “Nicky, honey, you’ve been beaten and stabbed and nearly murdered. Get a grip. The only place you need to go is to the clinic and then to bed.”

“This is my job, and I’m going to do it.” She headed toward the door to the living room—and, incidentally, toward Joe, who stood between her and said door—as she spoke. He stepped into her path and caught her by the shoulders. Her brows snapped together, and she scowled up at him. “Look, I’m in a hurry here. Drop the overprotective thing, okay?”

Dave walked back into the room.

“The mayor’s here,” he said to Joe. “He’s walking up from the street right now.Thought I’d give you a heads-up.”

“Shit.” Joe said, then met Nicky’s gaze and sighed. “Fine. You’re going to do this, I can see. You go out the front, though, and you’re going to have the media all over you like ants on a picnic. Let’s go out the back.”

“Let’s?” she asked over her shoulder, having already turned around to head for the back door. What he said made sense.

“Think I’m going to let you out of my sight? I’ll drive you.” He sounded resigned.

“Don’t you have things to do here?”

“Lots. Nothing more important than that.”

Nicky paused with her hand on the knob as the sense of that seeped into her brain. Despite the rush she was in, her heart gave a little flutter. She smiled at him.

“That’s romantic,” she said.

“I’m a romantic guy,” he said sourly, and reached around her to open the door.

“Joe.” Dave sounded alarmed. “What do I tell Vince?”

“Tell him I’ll be back.”

With that, Joe opened the door and they stepped out into the night. Nicky paused to bestow a quick pat on Cleo, whose velvety snout snuffling at her hand and arm seemed positively loving now, and then she and Joe slipped out the gate in the corner of the yard, did a wide circle around the crowd out front, and managed to make it to his car unseen. Only when he started the engine and turned on the lights did they attract any notice, but by then it was too late: He was pulling away down the street.

As they slowed down at the stop sign at the corner, a man came jogging out of the shadows toward them, waving at them to wait. For a moment, Nicky felt a frisson of fear, and then she remembered that the nightmare was over: The Lazarus Killer had been caught. This was a cop, she saw, as Joe got near enough so that she could identify the uniform. How safe was that?

“Bill Milton,” Joe identified him to her, and rolled down his window,

“Hey, Chief, can I catch a ride?” Milton was panting with the effort of catching up to them. He leaned in the window, glancing across at Nicky, talking to Joe. “My car’s blocked in back there, and I need to get to the police station. Dave said you’re heading to the Old Taylor Place, and it’s on the way.”

“Hop in,” Joe said.

Milton complied. He was still breathing hard when Joe slowed to a stop at the next intersection.

Then, without any warning at all, he slammed the butt of his gun into the back of Joe’s head. Nicky was still processing the unexpected blur of action and the sharp
thunk
when Joe slumped against the wheel.

24

N
ICKY WAS STILL GAPING at Joe, dumbfounded, when Milton grabbed a handful of her hair. The sudden sharp pain made her cry out. Her eyes watered.

“Put the transmission in park,” Milton growled. Her eyes automatically cut toward him. She felt the cold nudge of a gun against her neck and froze. With Joe limp and, presumably, no longer putting weight on the brakes, the cruiser was just beginning to roll forward.

“Put the transmission in park,” Milton screamed.

Nicky complied. The cruiser jolted to a halt.

Then something slammed hard into the back of her head and she knew no more.

A JOLT OF some kind of icy liquid in the face brought Joe instantly around. He blinked, coughed, and opened his eyes.

Milton was standing over him with an empty Mc-Donald’s large-sized drink cup in his hand. The contents, presumably not water because of the sweet smell and sticky feel, were running down Joe’s face and neck and wetting the collar of his white dress shirt.
Sprite,
he thought, tasting the citrusy tang on his tongue.

He could live with that. Or, he thought, as the situation he was in became clearer, maybe not.

“What the
hell
?” he said to Milton in amazement as an abortive movement brought him the unwelcome news that his hands were cuffed behind his back. He was, he discovered, lying on his side on a hard, cold floor. It felt like old stone, uneven and slightly damp. He was in some kind of weird room, a basement maybe, with a wet earthen smell and uneven walls. As far as he could tell, there were no windows, and the only light came from a camp lantern dangling from a hook in the ceiling. His jacket was missing, along with, he discovered with a quick downward glance, the Glock from his shoulder holster. A yellow-and-green bungee cord was wrapped tightly around his ankles, which explained the weird tingling he was starting to become aware of in his feet.

He wasn’t quite sure what was going on, but he was sure about this: It was definitely not a good thing.

“You want I should just go ahead and waste him?” Milton said over his shoulder.

“Nah. Let’s see if he won’t tell me where my money is first. I bet he will if we ask him real nice.”

Joe knew the speaker was Vince even before the mayor stepped into the light. As Joe goggled at him, his brain had already processed the fact that this was major bad news.

“What the hell?” he said, to Vince this time.

Vince was looming over him, his shadow falling across Joe’s body and the floor. Joe registered that he was dressed in the same coat-and-tie rig that he’d been wearing all day. The only difference was that now Vince was holding a gun in his hand. His arm was down at his side and the gun was pointed at the floor, but it was unmistakably there.

One more bad sign.

“I want my money, Joe,” Vince said.

Joe took a breath and tried to make sense of the whole situation. It made no sense at all—except for the fact that if he didn’t get out of it, he was probably going to die.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.” His words carried the ring of truth because, hey, they were true.

“My five hundred thousand dollars,” Vince explained patiently. “That you ripped off from that drug deal where you got shot. I want it back.”

Joe stared at him. Something was definitely awry here.

“Wait,” he said. “You were involved with that drug deal?”

“I was buying that coke, me and my organization, to bring down here and distribute. It was my money. It got confiscated, of course, along with the coke, when the bust went down. Only problem is, I found out from some of my people later that only four million, five hundred thousand dollars was logged in by the feds.
What happened to the other half mill?
I asked myself. Then I asked around. And the word came back: Right before the bust went down, a vice cop named Joe Franconi put the shakedown on my guys for ten percent of the pie. The four and a half million’s gone, and I accept that as the price of doing business. But that half million you took? Uh-uh. No way. I fucking want it back.”

Vince’s voice hardened at the end. Joe, busy absorbing a whole bunch of information that was new to him, simply stared at him for a moment. Vince
—Vince?—
had been the money guy on that deal? Of course, the word on the street had been that the drugs were slated for the South.

And Vince was a businessman, pure and simple. He lived for making money. Fixer-upper housing, hotel complexes, drugs: They were all the same in that they were moneymakers. And where there was money to be made, there was corruption. Joe’s eyes widened fractionally as it belatedly occurred to him that one of his own officers, Bill Milton, was apparently working for Vince. A dirty cop. And if there was one, there would be more. Vince, as a former vice cop himself, would know all about dirty cops.

Joe’s heart began to beat faster.

“I never took your money.” Joe said each word slowly and distinctly. He kept his gaze fixed on Vince, and at the same time tried to use his peripheral vision to assess his surroundings. He couldn’t quite work out where he was, but he had little doubt that it was somewhere on Pawleys Island. Pawleys Island, as he saw quite clearly now, had become Vince’s little fiefdom.

“I’m gonna refresh your memory one more time,” Vince said, and reached into his pocket. “This look familiar?”

When Vince withdrew his hand, there was something in it. He leaned over Joe, holding the object out. It was, Joe saw, a silver cigarette lighter. Joe’s eyes began to widen. . . .

“See the engraving?” Vince pointed with a stubby forefinger to the script carved into the lighter’s side. “It don’t say Mickey Mouse.”

In fact, it said “To Joe Franconi with love from Holly Alden.” Despite the iffy lighting, which made the inscription almost impossible to read, he knew, because it was his lighter, a gift from a former girlfriend.

“Just so we got things clear between us,” Vince said, “I’m gonna tell you that you dropped it when you shook my boys down, and it eventually got handed back to me. So why don’t you make this easy on both of us and quit with the bullshit? Tell me where my money is.”

The last time he had seen the lighter was when it was being tossed up and down in Brian’s hand the day before the bust went down. Suddenly, a lightbulb went on in Joe’s head and everything,
everything,
fell into place.
That
was why Brian had sold him out to Martinez: to cover up the fact that Brian, probably with the use of Joe’s badge and ID, had shaken down Martinez’s business partners for half a million dollars. If things had worked out the way Brian had intended, by the time Martinez found out about the shakedown, Joe, the supposed perpetrator, would have been dead.

Offed by Martinez for being a fed.

And Brian would have been half a million dollars richer, with no one the wiser.

You son of a bitch,
Joe said internally to Brian, not without a certain amount of admiration for the sheer ingenuity of the plan. It was simple, and
almost
brilliant—except for the fact that it had gotten Brian killed, and it looked like Joe was going to be next.