“Take it off, hottie! Work it!” a handsome black guy standing on the shore railing yelled between cupped hands.
“Come on, Nina. Accommodate the man,” Charlie said.
“Um, I don’t think he was talking to me, hottie,” I said, bursting into giggles.
Charlie laughed, too, as he took a handful of cards out of his jacket pocket. They were the business cards he’d received from media people during his press conference outside the prison after Justin’s stay. He finished his champagne and started thumbing numbers into his cell phone.
“Whoo-hoo! Look at me, momma. What do we have here? Producer for Larry King. A Vanity Fair guy. Heck, I’ve got Geraldo on speed dial now,” he said. “Screw HGTV. Maybe I’ll score one of those mock trial shows. How does Judge Charlie strike you? Hello, fifteen minutes. What took you so long?”
I smiled as the bow cut through the Tiffany blue waves. The wind was absolutely wrecking my hair, but I didn’t give a hoot. We were heading directly at the reddening sun now. I was almost back in the human race.
I finished my champagne and poured another. I tipped the glass to my lips.
To me, I thought.
I was lowering my flute when I suddenly felt dizzy. I blinked, rubbed my eyes. No! Don’t tell me I was getting seasick.
“Probably should take it easy until the first course, huh?” I said.
Then I felt really dizzy, extremely light-headed. I blinked as my vision blurred.
“Charlie?” I said, putting out my hand toward the ship’s rail to steady myself.
I turned as there was a loud thud.
Charlie had fallen out of his chair. He was facedown on the varnished teak deck, his cell phone by his hand, his business cards fluttering like leaves.
When I leaned forward out of my chair to see what was wrong, I lost my balance and pitched out of my seat onto the deck as well. I tried to get up on my knees, but I was suddenly weak, unsteady. I lay back down on my stomach, struggling to catch my breath.
I craned my neck around and looked up at the bridge’s tinted window. The captain was gone. Before I could figure out any of this, the door to the bridge opened a moment later. There was a jingle and a click-click-click sound, and then a cute little dog appeared on the deck. It was a Jack Russell.
Chapter 104
I WASN’T SURE if it was ten minutes or ten hours later when my eyes snapped open in the dark.
I was on my back. I lay there, blinking and breathing rapidly, as my weak, disoriented mind struggled to remain conscious.
My face felt like someone had used it as a hammer. My stomach was one large, acidic sour knot. The taste in my dry mouth was vaguely medicinal. My entire body felt strange and puffy, as if I were wrapped in a cotton ball cocoon.
Accident? was my first coherent thought.
Then the below-deck cabin I was in tilted and creaked, and my eyes went wide as I remembered everything. An aha moment straight from hell.
I remembered Charlie, facedown on the deck beside me. The champagne had been doctored, I realized.
“No,” I said weakly. I tried to move my right arm. I turned my wrist maybe a centimeter before it rolled back like a too heavy log. I was still drugged. Was it anesthesia?
I was trying to move my other arm when I heard something in the distance: a hollow thump followed by a tremendous splash.
I closed my eyes as panic bloomed in the pit of my stomach. It began to rise into my throat like the numbers on a thermometer in a blast oven when I heard the close sound of heavy footsteps above.
Think! I urged myself. I tried to. But there was nothing except the dark. Nothing but the accelerating beat of my heart. Finally, a wave of temptingly sweet exhaustion passed through me like a last hope.
Of course, I thought. I needed to go back to sleep. Figure it out later, much later.
I heard the opening of a door, someone coming down the stairs.
Stop it! Wake up! some other part of me thought. Stand up! I frantically began to beg myself.
The other lazy part was having none of it. I free-fell back toward the safe oblivion of sleep with a sigh, as if that would save me.
A moment later, my eyes bolted open as the reek of ammonia scoured my nostrils like a serrated knife.
“Haven’t I seen you someplace before?” the Jump Killer said as he lifted me into his arms.
Chapter 105
THE JUMP KILLER carried me into a bright room that looked like a library. There were dark, varnished, oak-paneled walls; leather-bound books on shelves; an expensive wooden globe; a cigar humidor; a fully stocked bar. Above the bar, a signed collector’s baseball bat was lit like a painting in a gallery.
But instead of furniture, in the room’s exact center was a massive four-poster bed. The incongruity of it reminded me of the gurney they’d strapped Justin Harris to in the death chamber. That wasn’t the only similarity, I realized. From all four posts dangled dark metal circles. Handcuffs, I realized, as I was dropped onto the bed.
“Welcome to the Jungle Room,” the Jump Killer said. “This is where all the magic happens.”
I noticed what I was wearing for the first time as my wrists and then my ankles were cuffed. I stared down at myself and began to weep.
I was in some kind of see-through bra and underwear, a garter belt, stockings. My arms and legs had been moisturized with a sickeningly sweet cherry-scented lotion. I realized then that I was wearing makeup. Gobs of it were greased onto my cheeks, smeared on my lips, caking my eyes.
“Please,” I said through my slimy lips. “Please don’t… don’t kill me.”
“That’s funny. That’s exactly what Tara Foster said all those years ago. Right before I strangled her to death with her bra,” the Jump Killer said, folding his meaty arms. “Maybe if you’d been smart and let Harris take the fall for it, you wouldn’t be in this pickle.”
That’s when I noticed there was another door in the room’s corner. From behind it suddenly came Mexican pop music, loud, frenzied racing horns. There was the clop of stamping feet, excited voices, drunken laughter. The Mexican music was cut short to howls and then a rap song started up and there was more stomping and howling.
“What is this? Who are they?” I said.
“They’re drug dealers,” the Jump Killer said. “Top Mexican cartel guys. Real big shots. I get their women for them. Don’t worry. You’re going to get to know them all very soon, very intimately.”
My mind whited out for a moment. Sizzling fuzz filled my head like a lost TV signal.
“I’m not a prostitute!” I cried.
“They don’t want a prostitute, silly,” he said. “This is a special celebration. These boys just closed a huge deal for very, very big money. They risked their lives, their freedom, and came out on top. They’re ready to party till you drop. In your case, party till they get sick of raping you and drop you dead in the water.”
There it was. The most horrible thing of all. It explained why there were so many disappearances, why some of the missing women’s bodies were never found.
“You wouldn’t believe the amount of money these guys spend. Not that I don’t deserve every penny, with all the cleanup. Sometimes I think some of these fellas must be half Mayan or Aztec because after they’re done, you’d think it was a human sacrifice in here with all the blood. I have to wash the goddang sangre off of the ceiling.” The Jump Killer smiled.
“I’m getting your attention now. I can see it in your face. You’re a little long in the tooth for them, but I’m offering you as a special, a half-price appetizer. Those are my orders, and I’m not going to screw them up this time. After all, they came straight from the big man himself.”
Orders?
“What are you talking about?” I mumbled. “From who?”
The Jump Killer started laughing then. “You still don’t know what the hell is going on, do you? Even now. Of course not. Precious little Jeanine always kept in the dark.”
What!?
“My
orders come from Peter, Jeanine. Remember him? Your husband? My best friend. There is no Jump Killer. There never was one. There’s just Peter. Peter and me.”
Chapter 106
THE HILARITY NEXT DOOR hit a fever pitch as the old-school rap classic “Wild Thing” by Tone-Loc started up. The volume suddenly blasted twice as loud as I lay there staring up at the coffered ceiling.
“You know Peter used to talk about you all the time,” the Jump Killer said, sitting in the chair by the side of the bed and checking his watch. “The silly things you guys used to do together. He really thought you were a good kid. I wanted to meet you, but of course Peter said no way. I think he might have really even loved you. That’s why I was so surprised when he asked me to kill you.”
I looked at his face. He was still smiling.
“You never figured this out?” he said, shaking his head. “Peter hired me to kill you, Jeanine, while he was off on his fishing trip. Make you disappear. Sell you to our drug-running friends like all the others. I was going to do it, too, when I saw you leave the house.
“I followed you around all goddamn day, watched you cut yourself on the beach, watched you dye your hair. I didn’t know what the hell you were doing until you hit the Overseas Highway and I realized you were exiting stage left. That’s when I pulled up and gave you a lift. But then you pulled that trick with the Mercedes and you got away. At first, I didn’t know what to do. But it looked like you weren’t coming back anyway, so I just lied and said I killed you.”
The cotton ball effect of the drug began to wear off and was replaced by a dull head-to-toe ache. I moved my right arm. It went a foot before the handcuff got painfully taut against my wrists. I stared at the bed’s heavy wooden posts inside the steel cuffs. They were scratched and worn from use, as if chewed. I gagged as I realized it was from women rattling them as they struggled.
When I looked back, the Jump Killer was picking at something in his perfectly capped teeth with his pinkie.
“I should have told Peter the truth, but frankly I was afraid to,” he said. “You think I’m bad? Peter’s like the Tony Soprano of Key West, except without the sense of humor.” The Jump Killer shrugged. “But he never showed you that side, did he? With me, it was always death threats and slapping me around for forgetting something, but not you. With you, it was always flowers and rainbows and love notes.”
He stood and yawned.
“See, Jeanine, women, even wives, come and go, but friends are forever. Best friends, anyway. We were in the Rangers together. When he needed someone to watch his back, I was the one he called. I’ll admit that he really wasn’t too happy with me when he saw you in New York. But he finally relented and gave me a second chance to take you out. I almost had you at your hotel room, too.”
The Jump Killer walked to the door and opened it.
“Don’t worry, though. I’m not going to blow it this time. When these boys are finished with you, before your burial at sea, I’m going to put two bullets in the back of your head to make sure you stay dead. Once and for all.”
Chapter 107
THE DOOR CLOSED. A quotation popped into my head as the electric guitar riffed between hip-hop bass thumps next door.
The hard way is the only way.
Whether it was from a writer or the Bible, I couldn’t quite recall. All I remembered was that I never understood it. Why would someone choose for things to be hard?
But as I lay there, my face drenched with tears, an ironlike fear clenching every sinew of my body, I finally knew what it meant.
It meant there were no shortcuts. You had to pay for things. Sometimes, it was your job to go down no matter how unfair things were. Meeting Peter had allowed me to avoid my fate for killing Ramón Peña, at least up until now. Today I was going to pay for that crime with interest.
I remembered how shocked I’d been when I’d seen how resigned to die Justin Harris had been. I wasn’t shocked anymore.
Someone knocked on the door.
But instead of stiffening with a soldierly stoicism like Justin, I went into a full-body twinge of revulsion and horror. My tendons felt like they were about to pop.
“Hola!” said a jolly whisper as the door opened.
The man who stepped in looked more French than Mexican. He was swarthy and tall and lean with long, lustrous shoulder-length black hair. A cigar jutted from his stubbled jaw. In his tailored pinstripe suit coat, an open-throated banker’s shirt, and nice jeans, he looked European, a sophisticate, a rich ne’er-do-well dandy ready for a night on the town.
When he took off his suit coat, I saw that he wore a pearl-handled automatic in a shoulder rig. He smiled at me from around his cigar as he selected a bottle and glass from the bar and poured himself a tall drink of whiskey. He pointed to the drink and then at me in a gallant gesture, wondering if I wanted one.
The handcuffs started click-clacking off the wood as I started to shake.
He shrugged his shoulders in an oh-well gesture. Then he puffed elaborately on his cigar, blew smoke up at the coffered ceiling, and approached the bed.
He was sitting at the foot, pulling off one of his cowboy boots, when there was a noise over the loud music.
It was the wail of an air horn above deck.
Next door, the volume quit as men shushed one another, listening.
“This is the United States Coast Guard!” came the order from a bullhorn. “No one move!”
Two gunshots blasted one right after the other above us. There was a surprised yell in Spanish followed quickly by a splash.
“Don’t move! We will shoot! Don’t move!” the bullhorn speaker said.
There was some more gunfire, and the long-haired man at the end of the bed looked up in shock as running footsteps passed directly overhead.
One boot on, one boot off, his cigar in his mouth and his automatic out, he clopped to the door. He opened it. Then I screamed as he pulled the trigger.
There were more shots and yelling as someone returned fire. A hunk of paneled wood blew out of the wall beside the drug dealer’s head. Then the gun suddenly fell from his hand. The expression on the man’s face was one of curiosity as he looked down at his blood-soaked banker’s shirt. Then there was another violent, earsplitting bang and then another and he fell, sparks from his cigar flying up as he crashed forward onto his face.
I was crying as young men dressed in blue and carrying rifles rushed into the room. After another moment, Charlie, soaking wet, was smiling down at me. He wasn’t dead somehow.
I tried to say something, but found that I couldn’t. It seemed like I was in shock.
Charlie tried to pull me off the bed until he saw the handcuffs. Then he took the baseball bat off the wall and began breaking the bedposts one by one.
Chapter 108
“OK, ONE MORE TIME from the top,” Scott Dippel, the commanding officer of the coast guard ship, said, clicking his pen in one of the now docked cutter’s staterooms.
I was wearing some borrowed USCG sweats and my hair was still wet from, by far, the best shower I’d ever taken in my life. Charlie sat next to me. He was holding a bag of frozen green beans against the lump on his head that he received when he planted his face on the deck.
“Yes, please. From the tippy top, considering we have two men dead and three Mexican nationals in custody,” added FBI Agent Holden. He’d come aboard immediately when we returned to the coast guard’s base.
The Jump Killer, or whoever he was, had been shot dead. Trying to escape in the drug dealers’ boat, he had fired on the coast guard ship. The coast guard guys returned the favor with their fifty-caliber machine gun.
As I was taken aboard, I actually saw his blown-apart body, floating facedown in the water, under the ship’s floodlight. I didn’t need any grief counseling. If anything, my only regret was that I hadn’t been able to do it myself.
“Slowly now,” Dippel said. “Who was the big guy we shot?”
“Captain Bill Spence,” Charlie said. “
He’s a client of mine, or he was. He drugged us and threw me overboard. I woke up in the water on my back with two gallons of salt water in my stomach. I saw the yacht’s running lights and dog-paddled toward them for what seemed like three hours. The go-fast speedboat pulled alongside when I was about a couple of hundred feet away. When the Mexican guys boarded the yacht, it took everything I had to drag myself onto their boat, and I used its radio to call you.”
The tall red-haired sailor clicked his pen again. “And the Hispanic men are?”
“Mexican drug dealers,” I said. “Spence abducted women and brought them out to sea and sold them to drug runners who raped and killed them at their sick parties. Which was exactly what would have happened to me if Charlie hadn’t called you.”
“How do you know all this?” Agent Holden wanted to know.
“Spence told me!” I yelled. “Don’t you understand? I wasn’t kidding when I said I knew that Justin Harris didn’t kill Tara Foster. Spence was the Jump Killer. He was the man who tried to abduct me all those years ago. He’s been abducting and selling women since Miami Vice was popular. Not only that, he said the chief of police was involved. Peter Fournier was his partner. In fact, he said Peter ran the drug trade in Key West.”
“That one I can’t understand,” Dippel said. “Peter Fournier? I know him. I’ve eaten at his house. Our kids are on the same baseball team. That can’t be right.”
“You think you feel stupid? I married the man,” I said. “Spence also said Peter had hired him to kill me before I got away.”
“It all actually makes sense now,” Charlie said, shifting the frozen beans to his other hand. “The captain became my client and good buddy right around the time it came out in the local paper that I was representing Justin. He would ask about the case all the time. And I thought he was just a crime buff or something. He was the one who actually offered the free cruise for us to celebrate!”