White Hot (31 page)

“Jeremiah and me? We haven’t—”

“You have and you are. Look, I don’t care. Really. I’m on a time clock, so to speak. I’m hired to get results, and results I get. My point is, if we all just figure out what’s in our individual interest, we’ll do okay here. If not, then this thing keeps going, and it keeps getting worse. That’s hard on you. It’s hard on me. You remember my speech, right? Expedience is the key here. You fight only to get away. And I’m offering you a way out.”

Mollie suddenly felt chilled. “Mr. Marcotte, you don’t understand Jeremiah Tabak. He isn’t going to back off a story just because you want Deegan—”

“Not me, Miss Lavender. I don’t give a shit about Deegan.”

“All right. Then Jeremiah isn’t going to back off just because whoever hired you wants to keep Deegan from getting caught. My God. Why didn’t you put the fear of God into him sooner?”

Marcotte shrugged his massive shoulders. “We thought he’d get scared off at the idea of some real muscle horning in on his territory.”

“That was the attack on me.”

“Yep. Didn’t work. The little fuck swiped Lucy Baldwin’s watch. Didn’t work to try to put the fear of God in you, either, I might add. So, it was on to Plan B.”

“Croc.”

“He’ll take the fall for the thefts. Deegan here will get with the program and shut up.”

“And me?” she asked quietly.

“I’m thinking.”

Deegan sniffled, but he’d stopped crying. He looked spent. Dropping his hands to the floor, he pushed himself up on his feet. A flash of the old cockiness asserted itself. “You can go to hell. So can whoever hired you. I’m calling the police and confessing.
You
can explain what you did.”

“They’ll lay everything on you. All the thefts, the call, the attack on your brother. That’s the idea, you know. To put you between a rock and a hard place. If you confess, you get the whole ball of wax dumped in your lap because it’s easier that way.”

“You fucking son of a bitch—”

“Who hired you?” Mollie asked, breaking in before Deegan could try to jump the guy. “The Tiernays? They must have realized Deegan was in over his head and tried to stop him—”

Marcotte snorted. “You kidding? They don’t have a clue what their little angel here’s been up to.”

Diantha Atwood came into the room from the opposite entrance. Regal and calm, she sighed at her grandson. “I thought this might work. I honestly thought it might. Obviously we’ll have to try sterner measures.”

Deegan gaped at his grandmother. “What are you talking about?”

“I had hoped we could leave this case unsolved. But I can see that even if you will listen to reason, Mollie and Jeremiah won’t. So, we have to solve this case for them. Or for Jeremiah, at least.”

“I said I’d confess—”

“No, no. That’s not an option.” She quietly removed her hand from behind her back and leveled a gun, not a big one but big enough, at George Marcotte. “We caught Mr. Marcotte here in the middle of robbing Mr. Pascarelli’s house. He tried to fire on us, but I, in self-defense, shot him. We then discovered my favorite, most expensive bracelet in his pocket. He’s our thief.”

“You crazy old bat,” Marcotte said. “What about Tabak and Lavender?”

“Let me worry about them. I believe you’re what’s called the fall guy, Mr. Marcotte. Everything will be credited to you.” She kept her gun leveled at him. “Please don’t despair, Deegan. It’s no loss.”

Mollie’s tongue and lips had gone dry, her throat was so tight she could barely breathe. Deegan, motionless, continued to stare at his grandmother. “Gran, you can’t do this. It’s wrong. Jeremiah will be back any minute, and Mollie will tell the police exactly what she saw. She won’t lie for you.”

“But you will,” Diantha Atwood said.

Which had to mean, Mollie thought, that she wouldn’t need to lie. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you? You’ll say I got caught in the cross fire or that Marcotte killed me first and that’s why you fired on him. Something.”

“That’s
stupid.”
Marcotte glared at the older woman, showing no sign he was afraid. “Lady, you don’t know what you’re doing.”

Diantha Atwood gave him a cold look. “I should remember, if I were you, who has to resort to beating up weaker people in order to survive in this world. Deegan, please leave the room. I don’t want you to have to see the ugly reality of what your behavior has forced me to do.”

“Gran…”

“Go, Deegan. Now.”

He hesitated, panic and confusion clouding his face. His grandmother aimed her gun. Mollie had no idea if the woman knew how to shoot. Marcotte, she could see, had the same question. He moved. Deegan jumped, dove for his grandmother, yelled, “No!” as the gun went off.

Diantha Atwood screamed in horror. “Deegan! Deegan, my God, no!”

Mollie dropped beside him, saw the blood oozing from his right side. She grabbed a throw pillow off the couch and pressed it against the wound while his grandmother became hysterical. “It’s okay, Deegan,” she whispered as he grimaced, barely breathing, barely conscious. “I’ll get you to a hospital. I’ll take care of you. Just hang on.”

In her peripheral vision, Mollie could see Marcotte moving fast, removing the gun from Diantha Atwood’s flagging grip and backhanding her to the floor.

“You stupid bitch,” he said, calm, cold, “you shot your own grandson.”

At which point, Jeremiah charged into the room, Kermit Tiernay hobbling behind him, white-faced, taking in his bleeding brother and horrified grandmother.

Mollie made her voice work. “He’s got a gun.”

“I see,” Jeremiah said.

But he didn’t stop. He couldn’t. Some dark force seemed to drive him forward, and Mollie shot to her feet, grabbing another throw pillow and whipping it at Marcotte. It was just enough to distract him for a fraction of a second. Jeremiah dove. The two men went down hard, Marcotte’s superior size and experience no match for Jeremiah’s fury. He gripped Marcotte’s gun hand, keeping him from firing, pounding his knuckles into the floor, yelling, “Mollie, goddamnit, get the gun!”

Croc jumped down beside his brother, ignoring his grandmother as she tried to push him away. Kermit wasn’t her favorite anymore.

Mollie scrambled to Jeremiah, pulled the gun from Marcotte’s hand even as he got position on Jeremiah and threw him off. Both men sprang to their feet, coiled, ready to rip each other apart.

Hating the feel of the gun in her hands, Mollie leveled it. “Stop.
Stop!
Marcotte, I’m not a good shot, but you’re one hell of a big target. Who knows what I’d hit. So cut your losses and…and just stop.”

He did, breathing hard. “You’re a bunch of crazy fucks. The money’s not worth this crap. Damn, I don’t know why—” He glared at Diantha Atwood. “You’re going down with me, bitch.”

Jeremiah turned to Mollie, and she gave him a quivering smile. “You’re late.”

“I’m never late,” he said. “I was just in the nick of time.”

The gun was shaking.
She
was shaking. “Deegan…”

Jeremiah moved toward her. “We need to call an ambulance and get the police here. I don’t know where the phones are. Maybe if you give me the gun…”

She had it in a death grip. She couldn’t seem to pry her fingers loose.

Marcotte watched it, the color going out of him. “Jesus Christ. Her finger’s on the damned trigger.”

“It’s
stuck.”

“Tabak…”

“Mollie.” His voice was soothing, as if he were making love to her. He eased beside her and touched her shoulder, a whisper of warmth. “I’ll put my hand under the gun. You just relax and let go. Okay?”

She nodded.

One hand still on her shoulder, he placed the other one palm up under the butt of the gun. His skin felt so hot. No wonder she couldn’t let go. Her fingers were icicles.

“Mollie, the phone. You need to call 911. Just let go, and I’ll get rid of this thing. Come on, sweet pea. I’m here. We’re here together.”

Her fingers released.

Marcotte sagged. He sank against the wall.

Croc had his arms around his brother, his head in his lap, and if he was in any pain from his own injuries, he didn’t show it. He kept the pillow pressed up hard against the wound. Deegan was unconscious. Diantha Atwood sobbed soundlessly, her slender body shaking violently. “Call an ambulance,” she said hoarsely. “Please. Hurry. I was only trying to protect him. Things just got out of hand.”

With a fresh wave of adrenaline kicking in, Mollie left Marcotte and Diantha Atwood to Jeremiah and raced into the kitchen. She gave the 911 dispatcher everything she had, told her she might want to get Frank Sunderland here, and in the back of her mind—far back, where she was still sane and led a normal life—she knew she’d have to tell her family and Leonardo about this one.

When she hung up, she stood in the dark, quiet kitchen. Jeremiah. There’d been nothing neutral or objective in the way he’d tackled the thug who’d beaten up his friend, who had a gun on her. She smiled, fighting back tears. He was maddening. Utterly maddening. And yet, once again, she couldn’t imagine her life going on without him.

But it might have to.

The story had reached its conclusion, and as confident as she was that what they’d had in the past few days was real to him, she just couldn’t be sure it would last.

Then she thought of Deegan Tiernay, bleeding in the next room, and Croc, and Diantha Atwood, and she picked up the phone to call Michael and Bobbi Tiernay.

But as she reached for the phone, it rang. She picked up the receiver. “Mollie Lavender.”

“Mollie, m’girl, I knew you’d be there.”

It was Leonardo, boisterous and exhausted. She felt the tears forming, spilling into her eyes. “Leonardo, it’s what, three or four o’clock in the morning in Austria?”

“I couldn’t sleep. I had to know. Tell me, m’darling, how was your party?”

17

T
he Palm Beach cat burglar was front-page material on virtually every newspaper in the country, including the
Miami Tribune.

Helen Samuel wrote the story.

It was her first front-page story in her fifty-year career. She arrived on Jeremiah’s doorstep to show him. He told her she got the front page because it was a slow news day. “Otherwise, it’d be buried inside.”

“Ha! You’re just jealous.” She was out front with the boys, passing out cigarettes and copies of the
Trib
with her byline above the fold, as delighted with herself as Jeremiah had been at twenty-six. “We’ve got not one but two rich boys, we’ve got a doting rich grandma with a gun, we’ve got a hired thug, and we’ve got you, Tabak.” That last she clearly loved. “A Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter tackling a two-hundred-twenty-pound security expert in Leonardo Pascarelli’s media room. Damned good thing you were heroic or your reputation would be shit right now. You watch, it’ll be a TV movie.”

“Don’t forget the publicist,” he said.

“I’m not. She’s the innocent, the ordinary person caught up in extraordinary circumstances with her unique set of clients. A jazz-playing Apollo astronaut. A mutt. Then there’s the caterer.”

“Griffen Welles.”

She’d entered the kitchen to finish cleaning up and had found her boyfriend shot and bleeding, a battered Croc holding him, a white-faced best friend, and Jeremiah holding a gun on a near-catatonic elderly socialite and a well-known security expert. The police and ambulance were en route. And so were the Tiernays. Unwilling to leave his brother’s side, Croc had asked for a portable phone and called them himself.

“It’s a great story,” Helen said with a satisfied sigh. Forty-eight hours after it was over, and she still hadn’t let it go. “Of course, I knew it would be. That’s why I kept giving you the dish and letting you do the running around. I’m too old for that shit.”

Sal, Bennie, and Al passed around a book of matches and watched her, transfixed. Sal looked particularly smitten. Jeremiah just shook his head.

Helen grinned at him. “God, this feels good. The kids’re going to be all right, you know. Deegan and Kermit. Their folks got with the program in the end. Momma was a little late on the upswing, but she’s at the hospital round the clock, had Kermit moved into the main house. They’re making the younger boy take responsibility for what he did, but they’re right there with him.”

“He got their attention,” Jeremiah said.

“That he did. Atwood’s only talking to her lawyers, but the way I see it, she was raised by disengaged parents, then raised her own daughter that way. The generational cascade at work. The triumph of form over substance.” She flicked her half-smoked cigarette onto the porch and ground it out with her foot; the guys, Jeremiah knew, would do likewise. “You figure out what to do about your blonde?”

He rolled up on his feet. He’d spent last night at his apartment; he’d needed the space, Mollie had needed the space, and his reptiles needed to know he was still alive. Plus, Bennie, Al, and Sal had wanted details. They’d left a message on his voice mail—it was Sal who figured out how to use it—saying they were renting a car and driving up to Palm Beach if he didn’t get down there. Over bagels and coffee and a little whittling on the porch that morning, Jeremiah gave them details, and they gave him advice. Unsolicited advice. It had to do with marriage, commitment, kids, and having a life. And a dog. Bennie thought he should get rid of the reptiles and get a dog. A beagle would be good.

Then Helen had arrived.

He regarded her with an affection that even a month ago he would have thought impossible. “Yes,” he told her, “I most certainly know what to do about my blonde.”

Mollie didn’t know how they did it. Busy musicians all, her parents, her sister, and Leonardo all managed to arrive at the West Palm Beach Airport within an hour of each other. They brought their instruments, and tons of unnecessary clothes because they hadn’t taken the time to think about what they really needed, and they wanted to hear everything, the whole story, all over again, from start to finish. It was a transparent show of support that Mollie appreciated.

They were out back, now, with Griffen Welles and Chet and a few other of her clients, all making sure she was okay, that she didn’t feel alone and isolated in her new home. She’d wandered out front to get her bearings.