The Finishing School (38 page)

Just as she finished congratulating herself on how well she was handling the thick sounds of the night echoing in her ears, the flashlight flickered and went out, plunging her into darkness. For a moment she stood completely still, not quite believing her bad luck. Then she flipped the switch back and forth several times to no avail. Hopeless. Fucking thing was a piece of crap. She threw it into the bushes and drew a deep breath, trying to figure out what to do next. There weren’t many choices. She could stand rooted to this spot all night, till the sun came up, and hope Expo’s goons didn’t step on her on their way back down the path. She could sit on the ground and let bugs crawl all over her. Or she could wait for her eyes to adjust and keep walking. Not much of a choice—she’d keep walking.

The night was clear. Because the rain forest on either side of her was thick with vegetation, all she had to do was look at the thin corridor of starry sky overhead to keep to her route. And the moon was up, casting an unearthly white glow she could almost taste. After a moment she could see the path pretty clearly. She started walking, insides tight with anxiety, but then immediately stumbled over a tree root, tumbling to her knees, her hands lighting on disgusting, slick wetness.
Ugh
! Mud, wet leaves, bugs. Getting back up, she felt like bursting into tears. She hadn’t appreciated how much that pathetic flashlight had comforted her. The darkness was full of hidden threats. Damn it, why wasn’t she a smoker? Then at least she’d have a cigarette lighter in her bag. Or matches or…wait a minute. Frantically, Melanie grabbed the leather bag she’d been carrying over her shoulder and dug around its dark insides. Her fingers hit the hard metal of her cell phone. She pulled it out and turned it on. No reception, but it cast a warm, glowing light. She walked on, feeling calmer.

Five minutes later she turned off the phone. The path had ascended steeply, and now she stood on a shallow ledge overlooking a round, dark shimmer that had to be El Baño Grande reflecting the moonlight. She’d reached her destination, but now what? How would she find her people without alerting the enemy?

Directly ahead, all at once, lights flashed in the darkness. Loud pops registered in her ears, and a swarm of bats rose into the air from their perch on a nearby tree. Melanie threw herself down on the slimy path, stomach clenching with dread.

This was the place, all right. She’d wandered into the middle of a firefight.

THINGS WERE GOING like clockwork for Bud. This was no accident but rather the result of brilliant planning. Finally some payoff for being smarter than everyone else yet eating their shit so patiently for so long.

Jay called Bud’s cell phone at eleven-thirty from the office at Noir, the club in the Flatiron District that was strictly for the bridge-and-tunnel crowd. Noir was always packed on a Thursday night. Bud had advised Jay to be seen out and about so that he had an alibi for what went down in Puerto Rico, and Jay had fallen for it easily. Every step was carefully mapped, down to the fact that Jay’s office at Noir had a private back door that led out to the alley. Anybody watching would witness Jay enter his office from inside the club, alone. And plenty of people would be watching, because all eyes were
always
on Jay at his clubs. That was one of the perks of being a celebrity, and Bud was counting on it.

“Where the fuck
you
been?” Jay demanded, hearing the sirens in the background as Bud walked down the street. Bud was carrying the golf bag, annoyed that his feet were wet from the slush at the corners, that he didn’t have the cash to take a cab on a miserable night like this. That was about to change, but not soon enough for his taste.

“I’m not too far from you. I’m gonna stop by. I don’t want to get into details over the phone,” Bud said.

“Fuck that pussy-ass shit.”

“You’ll thank me later, Jay.”

“I want an update.
Now
.”

“Relax. I talked to Pavel. The deal happened already. Everything’s cool,” Bud lied smoothly. He was enjoying every second of this double-cross.

“If the transfer was made, why the fuck haven’t I heard from the Colombians?”

“I’ll be there in five minutes to explain. Leave the back door unlocked, okay? It’s better for you if nobody sees me.”

There was something very ultimate for Bud about this impending confrontation. It had become much more to him than just a settling of old scores. He felt like he’d finally be liberated from all the things in his past that smacked of failure, of defeat, of unfulfilled promise. He’d finally be free.

His mother and Jay’s had been sisters, Italian girls from Bensonhurst. Both had married minor thugs, but Jay’s father made a good living at it, whereas Bud’s was an Irishman with the Irish curse. He drank himself to death, but not before beating the crap out of Bud for enough years to fuck him up good. Then Bud and his mother were charity cases, living off Jay’s family, never allowed to forget that either. Everything Bud got his hands on—money, girls, drugs—Jay felt free to take away, and none of it was ever enough. Jay hadn’t stopped, never would. The guy had an appetite. Bud got his education, he got his job, and Jay had to put his hairy paws all over that, too. Bud found this perfect young girl, taught her all about sex. It made him want to cry, thinking about Whitney’s tits. Then Jay took her for his own purposes and ruined her, so she didn’t want to be with Bud anymore except as a way to get to Jay. That was the straw that finally broke the camel’s back.

Bud reached out with his gloved hand and pushed open the back door to Jay’s office. The place had been done by some trendy designer, and it was butt ugly. Black rubber floors, concrete walls, and strange lighting made from silver tubing. Jay was sitting in his silver swivel chair with his back to the door, talking on the phone. Fricking chair was so weird. Looked like it was covered in duct tape, but Bud happened to know it cost four grand. For a goddamn chair. Any idiot should’ve realized that a few nightclubs could never support Jay’s lavish lifestyle, yet somehow the guy had managed to skate along and avoid getting locked up. The feds were so incompetent it was hardly much of a challenge to beat the system.

Jay whipped around in the chair, phone in his hand. Bud could see from the expression on his face that the game was up. More than
up
: played out to the bitter fucking end.

“Jesus, Javier, I have no fucking clue how the cops found out about El Yunque,” Jay was saying as he stared at Bud with savage rage.

I do, you prick. I arranged for that little snitch to tell them, right before I beat his brains out with your golf club. Now I waltz away and everybody else gets locked up. Everybody except you. I have other plans for you.

Bud had bought the gun a week earlier in a dingy stairwell in the East Harlem projects. It was untraceable, with a defaced serial number, but it fired like a dream. He knew, because he’d been practicing.

Jay covered the mouthpiece of the telephone with his hand. “You’re a dead man,” he said to Bud. Then his eyes followed the golf bag as Bud dropped it on the floor, and he looked confused.

Bud held the gun in his right hand, hidden in the folds of his long overcoat. He lifted it in one beautiful, fluid arc just as he stepped up to the swivel chair and grabbed Jay by the throat. Bud had the advantage of complete and utter surprise, or else Jay would’ve twisted away easily. Jay had always been the stronger of the two by far; Bud had scars to prove it. But this time, when Jay’s mouth fell open in shock, Bud jammed the gun straight into it and squeezed the trigger, firing up and back. He blew Jay’s brains all over the designer walls, then carefully folded his limp, dead fingers around the gun. It was the perfect suicide, perfectly timed, just as the feds were closing in.

“ ’Ello? ’Ello?” the receiver squawked. And Bud replaced it carefully in its cradle before slipping out the back door.

LUCKY THING Melanie was so enamored of Dan O’Reilly’s voice. It had this killer rough-sweet quality, gravelly and totally sexy, with a noticeable New York accent. It was so distinctive to her ear that she even recognized its fingerprint in a brief grunt that emanated from a nearby
níspero
tree when the shooting started.

Melanie instantly plunged into the underbrush, heading for that tree. The air was thick with flapping bats and bright flashes of gunfire. Sharp branches tore at her clothes, but damn it, she was zeroing in on Dan.

“Shit, behind you!” she heard Bridget Mulqueen exclaim.

The next second something whizzed by Melanie’s ear, and it wasn’t a mosquito. The bullet knocked a branch off a tree behind her head. It fell with a crash, and she dropped to her knees into a tangle of thorny brush, her heart in her throat, the hair on the back of her neck standing up, every nerve quivering.

“Stop, stop! It’s me, Melanie! Don’t shoot!”

She knew she was yelling louder than safety counseled, but Dan was an excellent shot. If she didn’t stop him, he’d kill her, and what kind of ending would that be to their love story?

Dan stopped firing. “Melanie?” he called, pitching his voice low.

“Yes. I’m getting up. Don’t shoot.”

She stood up slowly, shaking all over, her arms and legs stinging where thorns had pierced her skin. She made her way the remaining ten feet to where Dan and Bridget crouched behind the tree.

“How’d
you
get here?” Dan asked, rubbing his eyes like he thought he was hallucinating.

“I took a cab.”

Bridget looked at her as if she were crazy, but Dan laughed. “That’s you, all right,” he said.

“I’m sorry, but I
had
to come,” Melanie whispered urgently. “Trevor’s missing. Esposito is still in New York. He never got on a plane to come here. I was thinking this deal was either a diversion or an ambush, and that I needed to warn you. But then I saw Lamar and Pavel coming here, so now I’m completely confused.”

“Uh,” Bridget said, mouth still hanging open in astonishment at Melanie’s presence.

“The hand-to-hand’s definitely going,” Dan said under his breath. “Two guys came in from the right less than five minutes ago, prob’ly the Colombians, because they were carrying a duffel bag, which we gotta assume has the product. Armed with assault rifles. One of ’em has a pit bull. Right before the shooting starts, Pavel and Lamar show up from the direction you just came from. They’re about to do the hand-to-hand when all hell breaks loose.”

“We think the local cops jumped the gun, started shooting for no reason,” Bridget explained.

“We can’t be sure. I don’t want to prejudge guys. You can barely see your hand in front of your face out here. But I gotta tell you, nobody was supposed to move until I gave the signal, and I did
not
give the fucking signal. It’s quiet now, but we don’t know if anybody’s hit,” Dan said.

“If
we
don’t know that, chances are the bad guys don’t know either, right?” Melanie said.

“What’s your point?” Dan asked.

“If you could call the locals off, maybe after a while the bad guys would assume whoever was shooting at them took a hit?”

“It’s possible.”

“Then maybe they’d make their exchange and try to leave. If we could pick off Expo’s guys and arrest them with the drugs, we’d have a prosecutable case. I know where they parked. We could set up on their car.”

“Huh,” Dan said, thinking.

“Well?” Bridget asked.

“Maybe. Not bad, actually. Our only other choice is to shoot it out, and obviously we’re not gonna fire first,” he said.

Somebody else made the decision for them. The moment the words left Dan’s mouth, bullets began to fly again up ahead. Bursts of gunfire mixed with shouting and cursing in Spanish. Dan and Bridget raised their weapons, ready to advance.

Dan threw a final glance over his shoulder at Melanie.

“You move from this spot, I’ll shoot you myself,” he said. But he gave her his gorgeous smile, backlit by gunfire, before he turned and strode off toward the battle.

MELANIE SLURPED hot café con leche from a bowl, struggling to keep her eyes open under the buzzing fluorescent lights of the Luquillo police station at three o’clock in the morning. Just as she was about to lose the fight and nod off, Lieutenant Albano walked in and marched up to her borrowed desk.

“What the hell happened out there?” he asked. Gotta love New Yorkers. Not one second wasted on preliminaries.

“I came in late, but from what I understand, the hand-to-hand was about to go down and the locals just…opened fire.” She held up her hands in dismay.

“Ah, crap.”

“The guy who shot first claims one of the Colombians was reaching for a weapon.”

“Was he?”

“Well, the Colombians definitely had assault rifles, so maybe. But now we have to deal with an IAB investigation in the middle of our case. It screws everything up.”

“Shit.”

“I’m just amazed nobody was killed. One of the Colombians is in the hospital with a bullet in his leg. I arranged with the local U.S. Attorney’s Office for a bedside arraignment later this morning. And we locked up Pavel Stepanov, Esposito’s bodyguard.”

“That’s good.”

“Yeah, except our case on him sucks. Once the shooting started, the hand-to-hand never happened, and the second Colombian ran off with the drugs. So we have no product to put on the table. It’s just a circumstantial conspiracy case. I mean, we could charge an attempt, but…”

“Son of a gun. It just gets worse,” Albano muttered.

Melanie paused, looking for a diplomatic way to bring up the subject that was foremost on her mind. But there was none. “So listen, Lieutenant.”

“Yeah?”

“What went wrong with Trevor? I mean, how could you lose him like that?”

Albano looked at her like he was seeing her for the first time. “Yeah, sorry about that one, kid. What can I say? The good guys don’t win every inning.”

“That’s it? I mean, Trevor’s a solid human being. What are we doing to find him?”

“We
were
following up a tip that I
thought
came from you about the hand-to-hand tonight, thinking maybe the Leonard kid got by us somehow and that he’d show up here. But obviously things didn’t play out that way.”