Orders?

"What are you talking about?" I mumbled. "From who?"

The Jump Killer started laughing then. "You still don't know what the h.e.l.l 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 cla.s.sic "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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n day, watched you cut yourself on the beach, watched you dye your hair. I didn't know what the h.e.l.l 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 ba.s.s 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 Ramon Pena, 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, l.u.s.trous shoulder-length black hair. A cigar jutted from his stubbled jaw. In his tailored pinstripe suit coat, an open-throated banker's s.h.i.+rt, 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+rt. 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 s.h.i.+p. 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 s.h.i.+p'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, s.h.i.+fting 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!"

Holden frowned. "What a G.o.dd.a.m.n mess," he said. "This is what you call taking it easy, Baylor?"

Agent Holden left the room to make some calls. An hour later, at around four a.m., he came back in and told us we could leave.

"Your story seems to pan out so far. I checked the registration on the yacht. Peter is actually listed as one of the owners. I also just got off the phone with my agent in charge. We're putting round-the-clock surveillance on Fournier. Until we grab him, I want you out of here, Miss Bloom, or Fournier, or whatever the h.e.l.l your name is. I want you to get checked out at the hospital and then get on the first flight out of here this morning, and don't think this is all over. We'll be keeping an eye on you. And you, Charlie. You can bet your a.s.s I'll be in touch."

Chapter 109.

WE SKIPPED THE HOSPITAL and went straight to the airport, stopping only to swing by Charlie's house so I could get changed and grab my bags.

The sun was rising behind the smudged Plexiglas window of the airport waiting area when Agent Holden called Charlie on his cell an hour later. Charlie excused himself to take the call.

"Holden just got to Spence's house with the state CSI team," Charlie said, clicking his phone shut as he came back inside. "Hopefully, they'll find evidence that'll link that psycho son of a b.i.t.c.h to Tara Foster's murder as well as to the disappearances of all those other women. He said the place looks like a landfill, so it'll probably take awhile."

Charlie shook his bruised purple head. "What a night, huh? Do I know how to party or what?" he said as they called my plane.

"Charlie, listen. I need to tell you something," I said. "I left something out."

"No," Charlie said. "Please. Not more."

"It's going to come out, and I want you to hear it from me first. It's about how I met Peter." I took a breath. I felt a weight s.h.i.+ft inside me, the weight of so many years of holding it all in.

"Seventeen years ago, when I was on spring break, I'd been drinking and got behind the wheel, and I accidentally killed a man. Peter was the first cop on scene. He helped me. He got rid of the body."

"What?" Charlie said.

"Yes, Charlie. That's how we met. That's probably why I married him. He protected me from going to jail. I'm just like him, Charlie. Corrupt. You need to stay the h.e.l.l away from me. Everyone does. My whole life is just one big lie. I guess it always has been."

Charlie stared at me. He winced, looking away. I could see tears in his eyes, pure hurt. It killed me to see him like that. He opened his mouth to say something, then he closed it again.

"Charlie," I said, starting to cry myself.

"I'm leaving," he said a moment later.

And that's just what he did, without another look back.

Chapter 110.

I SOMETIMES have trouble sleeping on planes, but not this time. I slept all the way to Atlanta, and after I switched planes I put my head back and went out like a light switch again. I didn't wake up until we were touching down in New York.

I was in my apartment an hour later, showered and in my own bathrobe and fuzzy slippers, when my wall phone rang.

Please let it be Charlie, I prayed, answering it.

"I just heard!" my boss, Tom Sidirov, yelled triumphantly. "You pulled it off! You actually saved a guy on death row. Home run! Grand slam! Come in right now. We'll go to lunch. I need to hear all about it."

"I'd love to, Tom," I said. "But I just got off the plane. How about tomorrow? I'm zonked."

"Of course, of course. Rest up for the TV cameras. I already called the PR guys. The firm's going to milk this thing for all it's worth. I'm so proud of you. I've been gloating to all the other partners all morning. We'll do a victory lap tomorrow. I knew you could do this, kid."

After I hung up, I wondered how jazzed Tom was going to be when he found out that I'd been lying to the firm, that I'd killed a man in a drunk-driving accident and covered it up, and that my name wasn't Nina Bloom.