Taken (33 page)

“Your grandmother seems to be dreaming a lot,” Bernice said. “She keeps mumbling words and phrases, and sometimes she’s agitated. There must be something on her mind.”

“What has she been saying?”

“Well, it’s not always clear. But a few minutes ago her
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eyes flew wide-open, and she looked at me as if she were seeing a ghost, as if she didn’t even recognize me. Then she said something like, ‘Where’s Johnny?’ Do you know who Johnny is?”

Kayla looked away from Bernice’s inquisitive eyes, her stomach beginning to churn. She’d thought her grandmother’s age had contributed to her mild heart attack, but maybe there was more behind it. “I’m not sure.

Where did you find her?”

“On her porch, her front door wide-open. I don’t know if she was coming or going.”

“Did she say anything else when she woke up?”

Bernice’s brows knit into a severe frown. “ ‘Johnny’s dead. Johnny’s supposed to be dead.’ I think that’s right.”

Kayla felt a knot grow in her throat.
God!
Was Johnny alive? Was it possible he’d survived and made it to shore all those years ago? Was he part of this, too?

Kayla tapped her fingers on the aluminum rail by her grandmother’s bed, wishing Charlotte would wake up so she could ask her what had happened.

“It’s probably just the medication,” Bernice said. “I remember waking up from surgery once and having all kinds of crazy dreams.”

Maybe she was right. Maybe her grandmother was just dreaming about the past.

Her grandmother stirred and her eyes fluttered open.

Kayla moved closer to the bed. “Grandma?” she said.

“Are you all right?”

Her eyes slowly focused on Kayla. “Where . . . where am I?”

“You’re in the hospital,” she said, offering a reassuring smile. “You had a mild heart attack.”

“I did? Am I all right?”

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“You’re going to be fine,” Kayla said, hoping that was true.

“Oh, well, that’s good. The way you’re looking at me I thought it might be more serious. Who’s that behind you?”

“It’s me,” Bernice said. “You gave me quite a scare, Charlotte. I found you lying on your front porch.”

Charlotte’s gaze grew big and scared. She reached for Kayla’s hand, and as their eyes met, she whispered, “I saw him. He was standing right in front of my house. I went out to the get the newspaper and there he was.”

Kayla swallowed hard. “Who, Grandma? Who did you see?”

“Johnny,” she murmured. “I saw your grandfather.”

Charlotte’s mouth started to tremble, and the machine monitoring her heart began to beep. The nurse came into the room. “What’s going on in here?” she asked sharply.

“Nothing, we were just talking,” Kayla said.

“Well, you both need to leave. Mrs. Hirsch needs to rest. You can talk later. Go,” she said, shooing them out of the room.

As they left Bernice offered her a smile. “I’m going home now that you’re here. Please keep in touch, won’t you? Charlotte is a dear friend of mine. If there’s anything I can do, you call me.”

“I will. Thanks for taking care of her.”

“Anytime.”

As Bernice walked away, Kayla couldn’t help wondering if her grandmother had imagined seeing Johnny in the shadows. It seemed unlikely that he would have been alive all this time and not contacted her before.

And why would he come back now — because Evan had stolen his watch? Were the two events connected?

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Was everything connected? There was another player in the game, but was it Johnny?

“What happened?” Nick asked. He’d been waiting in the hall, wanting to give her time alone with her grandmother.

“My grandmother had a mild heart attack. She’s apparently been drifting in and out of consciousness. When she came to just now she told me that she saw Johnny standing in front of her house. She claims he said her name, and that’s the last thing she remembers.”

Nick’s eyes widened in astonishment, “Johnny is alive?”

“Grandma seems awfully sure.”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t make sense to me.”

“Maybe not, but I’m going to sit with her for a while, see if she can tell me any more the next time she wakes up.” She glanced down at her watch. “I might be here for a few hours. You should go home. I’ll be fine on my own.”

“I’ll consider leaving you on two conditions: You call me when you’re ready to leave, and you don’t venture away from this hospital room by yourself.”

“I think I’m pretty safe here.” She saw his pointed gaze and gave in. “Okay, it’s a deal. What are you going to do?”

“J.T. said he’d be here in the Bay Area sometime today. I’m going to try to track him down.”

“Keep me posted.”

“I will.”

As he walked away, Kayla felt suddenly very alone.

They’d spent almost every minute together the last few days. It was hard to watch Nick leave, even harder not to call him back. But she could do this on her own. She
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could sit in her grandmother’s hospital room and wait for her to wake up. Nothing was going to happen to her here.

Nick met J.T. in a small downtown sports bar later that night. His old friend was standing in front of a jukebox when he walked in. J.T. put a quarter in the machine, and

“Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen blared out of the speakers.

“Interesting choice,” Nick said, as he pulled out a chair.

J.T. grinned as he sauntered over to the table. “It reminds me of that time in college when Garrett, you, and me tried to form a band for Lindsay Adams’s birthday party.”

“I remember. She liked musicians.”

“And musicians liked her. She was hot, but I don’t think any of us got lucky that night.”

“Because we sucked. The dogs were howling,” Nick said. He hadn’t thought about those days in years. After Evan had messed up their lives, he’d moved off campus and concentrated on getting his degree as fast as possible.

It was as if his college life had been divided into two parts: before Evan and after Evan. Now his adult life was fitting into the same pattern. He’d like to start a new chapter with no Evan at all.

J.T. called the waitress over. “I’ll have a Corona. What about you?”

“Same,” Nick said as the waitress set down two napkins and a bowl of pretzel party mix.

“So, where’s your beautiful shadow?” J.T. asked. “I thought the two of you were attached at the hip . . . or somewhere else,” he said with a mischievous gleam in his eye.

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“Funny. Kayla is at the hospital. Her grandmother had a heart attack.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Will she be all right?”

“I think so. You’ll be interested to know that the heart attack came after a man approached Mrs. Hirsch at her house. She thought it was Johnny Blandino.”

J.T. raised an eyebrow. “The dead guy?”

“That’s what she thinks.” Nick paused as the waitress set down their beers. Then he said, “Do you have any news on your end? Figure out yet who fixed the brakes on Kayla’s car?”

J.T. frowned at that. “No, and by the way, I saw the car. You must have nine lives.”

“I’m using them up rapidly.” Nick paused as the waitress brought their drinks. “Did you track down that Helen Matthews the priest told us about?”

“She says she doesn’t know any of Frankie’s relatives.

She laughed when I asked her if he’d given her a watch.

She said Frankie was a cheapskate and a hoarder. He didn’t trust anyone with anything, and he hated to share.”

“So that was a dead end.”

“Yeah. This is different from Evan’s usual jobs, you know. It started out the same with the identity theft. He often takes on the lives of others to conduct his scams.

But then he veered off into left field. He didn’t take Kayla’s money. He didn’t use his marriage to her to work any other scam. He certainly had the opportunity to clean her out.”

“He didn’t need her money. He had mine.”

“Evan can always use more cash. Since taking the watch, he hasn’t worked any of his other scams, as far as I can tell — no check forging, no telemarketing schemes, no insurance fraud. It makes me wonder what his game is
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this time around.” J.T. took a long draft of his beer. “I think there’s a hidden agenda.”

J.T.’s words reminded him of what Jenny had told him earlier. “You might be right. Evan went to Jenny’s salon today.”

J.T. choked on his beer. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me. Apparently it wasn’t the first time. He actually made contact with her a couple of months ago.

I’m betting that was where he got the information on me, where I lived, what I was doing. It would have been easy for him to learn I was out of the country and move right into my life.”

“Shit! And Jenny didn’t tell you?”

“No,” Nick said shortly, not bothering to go into the other details. “She’s upset, though, because when Evan came by today he started talking about how they were going to be together, how he would impress her. She finally seems to think he’s flipped out.”

J.T. gave him a grim nod. “It sounds like it.”

“I want to get some protection for Jenny. Can you rec-ommend anyone?”

“I know some private guys here in the city. I’ll make some calls for you.” J.T. paused. “What else did Evan tell Jenny?”

Nick thought back to the conversation with his sister.

“Something about our not really knowing what he’s after.

We think we do, but we don’t. Whatever that means.”

“He could just be playing with you, knowing that Jenny would tell you that. But the idea that he wants to impress Jenny does tell me that his pride is involved. That may be his ultimate downfall. In the past he has never let things get personal. That’s one of the reasons he’s so
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good at what he does: He has no compassion or empathy for anyone else’s misfortune.”

“A sociopath.”

“I’d say so. He certainly has no conscience.”

Nick was reminded that J.T. had also suffered at Evan’s hands. “That’s rough, what he did to your father.”

“Yeah.” J.T. drained the rest of his beer and set the heavy glass down on the table with a forceful thud. “He got me good.”

Nick knew that J.T. and his father had had a love/hate relationship most of their lives. Evan had known it, too, and he’d gone after J.T.’s Achilles’ heel. “We made a hell of a mistake when we put that notice up on the bulletin board looking for a roommate,” he said. “We invited Evan into our lives.”

“We thought he was cool,” J.T. agreed. “The life of the party. An all-around great guy.”

“That’s what he wanted us to think. He wanted us to like him.”

“And now he wants us to respect him,” J.T. finished.

Nick thought about that for a moment. Maybe J.T. was right. Maybe it wasn’t just about revenge; it was about respect. Jenny had said that Evan intended to impress her, show her he was the best. What did that mean? “He must think that finding that treasure will bring him a huge windfall of cash. But is it really that easy to sell old coins without anyone tracing their origins to a famous theft?”

“It’s not that difficult to find private buyers, coin collectors.” J.T. leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table. “I’ve done some checking on that robbery, our Alcatraz boys, and some of their friends, including Kayla’s grandmother. Charlotte ran with a fast crowd. They were questioned extensively after the robbery. Their answers
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were often evasive, contradictory. For a while the police suspected some of the girls might be harboring the fugi-tives or hiding their loot.”

“Including Kayla’s grandmother,” Nick said.

“She was a suspect, as well as her good friend Dana, who, by the way, still happens to run that very same club as well, as a few other nightclubs in town. And,” J.T.

added with a smile, “Charlotte paid her a visit a few days ago, which she returned shortly thereafter. Now one might wonder why those two old broads are suddenly having a reunion — coincidentally just after Johnny’s watch gets stolen.”

“I don’t think I’d call Charlotte an old broad in front of Kayla,” Nick said dryly. “That is interesting, though.

I’ve always thought Charlotte knew more than she was telling. She seems torn between protecting the past and protecting Kayla. Maybe I should get back to the hospital, see if she has anything else to say. You know, perhaps it’s not such a long shot to think that Johnny is alive. He could be trying to get his money back.”

“He’d be in his seventies by now,” J.T. reminded him.

“Is there an age limit on greed?” he returned.

“No, but Evan usually works alone. I am going to speak with Delores Ricci again, now that she’s recovered, to see if she can give us more information on the watches and/or her father’s death.”

“Good idea.”

“Tell Kayla I hope her grandmother is okay, and if you hear any more about Johnny Blandino’s sudden rise from the dead, let me know.”

“Wouldn’t that be the ultimate irony? Evan finds the watches, only to discover they lead nowhere and there is no treasure. The Alcatraz boys retrieved it a long time
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ago. The con man gets conned. He’s not so smart after all.”

J.T. didn’t look convinced. “That’s been your problem with Evan all along.”

“What?”

“You always underestimate him.”

Everything in her bedroom was white and absurdly feminine, from the sheer canopy over the bed to the lace curtains and soft pillows. Even the thick carpet was a lush white. Did she think she was a virgin? Evan laughed as he sat down on the bed and stretched out his legs, enjoying the fact that his shoes were leaving a dark print on her comforter. It would annoy her, and he didn’t care. She’d made him angry. She’d done things she shouldn’t. He would have to teach her that he was the boss.

He watched the door open, ready to enjoy her moment of surprise. Her face would change. Fear would enter her eyes. Her mouth might even tremble. She would try to cover her fear with anger, try to take back the control she thought she had. But it wouldn’t work. He held all the cards. No one could beat the house, and he was always the house.