Jerry wore his stone cop expression the next morning. Wayne came back from his run to find Foster sitting on his wide porch with the newspaper and Jerry in his kitchen making coffee. Wayne watched through the open window as Jerry lined things up on Wayne’s new kitchen counter. The kitchen was to his right and the living room, with the door to the porch, was on his left. Wayne wiped his face with his T-shirt and then watched Jerry set the coffee utensils out, as neat as little soldiers. Wayne liked how the wood looked in the sunlight, liked the smell. He had found a pile of old boards behind the maintenance shed, probably roofing timbers and at least a half century old, thick as his calf. He had planed them and sawed them and laid out a new countertop to replace the peeling linoleum.
Jerry said through the window, “The thing kept me awake all night.”
Wayne didn’t need to ask what thing. He had not slept much either.
“We’ve got a crook working inside the guy’s company.”
Foster went through his folding routine with the paper, lining up the edges with a machinist’s precision, getting it down to magazine size. “If he worked inside the company, the boss would’ve known him.”
Wayne said, “We’re not talking about the angel.”
“Point one, it wasn’t no angel.”
Foster snorted. “Oh, and you’re so well connected to the man upstairs you’d know one? I don’t think so.”
“Hey. My mama didn’t raise no fool.”
“And you think this guy got to be boss of some big company being a fool?”
“That’s been bugging me too,” Wayne agreed.
Jerry poured a mug, handed it through the window to Foster. “Let’s say there’s two of them for the moment. A crook in the company who wants to take charge. But he’s a known quantity. So he comes up with this scheme, hire himself an outsider who’s gonna play on the man’s core weakness.”
“Hold this.” Foster handed Wayne his mug, set down his paper, and pushed himself erect. He took back his mug and said, “Who’re you to call a man’s religion a weakness?”
“Since when did you get big on the faith thing?”
“We’re not talking about me. We’re talking about a man who uses what he’s earned to do good. That’s got to count for something, even in this cockeyed old world.”
Wayne accepted his own mug, hooked his T-shirt over the porch railing, and backed off a pace. Content to stand there on his partially redone porch, listening to two guys the world called losers argue over a man none of them had ever met.
Wayne was flooded anew with the same strange sensation he had experienced the day before, walking back from the dovecote with his sister. An elderly trio walked past on the lane, hard-of-hearing Harry and his wife and another lady. Harry hefted his cane in greeting. Harry’s wife said something to Wayne about the weather. The other woman gave him a wave and kept going.
Jerry said, “You’re taking this personal.”
Foster said, “Doggone right. A man like this deserves better.”
“You let your emotions cloud your judgment, you can’t work a case clean.”
“Yeah, well, that might work okay for Mister Ace Detective, but me, I do my best work when I’m good and hot.”
Jerry refilled his mug and walked out of the kitchen and through the living room and joined them on the porch. “Let’s get back to this scam.”
Wayne said, “So we’re assuming this was not an angel.”
Jerry didn’t even bother to respond to that one. “You notice any resemblance to what we just been through here?”
“You mean the accountant?”
“I’m not saying there’s a connection. But it just hits me as strange, how we got two scams so close together. Big ones. Operated by pros.” Jerry used his mug as a pointer. “Foster here is no dummy—he managed a whole string of dry cleaners.”
“I did,” Foster corrected, “until my stinko of a nephew robbed me blind.”
“And I worked crime for thirty years. That accountant took us both in. Now we got another guy with some serious experience running people and managing money, who’s been hit hard enough and low enough that he’s holed up in his own house and letting other people run his company.” Jerry tasted his mug. “Cops hate coincidences.”
Wayne said, “We need to find out who leases the scam artist his Lantern Island house.”
“Let me make a couple of calls,” Jerry said.
A whining grew in the distance, the sound familiar enough now that they all turned as one. Foster said, “Here comes trouble.”
The red Ferrari seemed impatient even when going slow. Particularly when the driver could not help but gun the motor once before cutting it off. The silence afterwards felt like a vacuum.
The two doors opened. Tatyana wore a business suit with a skirt so short, getting out of the Ferrari became a dance of the pinstriped veils.
Julio emerged from the car in a teenage daze. Big as he was, he scarcely seemed connected to the earth as he followed Tatyana over to the porch.
Jerry said, “Trouble is right.”
Tatyana said something to Julio in rapid-fire Spanish. The kid responded with a goofy grin, clearly so in love with the woman and her ride he forgot all about the need for the street.
“Hope you made sure your radio is still where it belongs,” Jerry said.
Tatyana spoke to Julio again in Spanish and his eyes congealed to black stone. The lady had obviously just revealed the black man’s former profession.
“Nothing like a cop to kill a good high,” Julio said.
“I’m retired, ese.”
“You know what they say. You can take a pig out of the pen—”
“Whoa. Enough.” Wayne walked down the stairs. “We’re all friends, okay?”
Jerry demanded, “What’s Señor Drive-By doing here?”
“I invited him.”
Foster said, “This is the kid I told you about.”
“You spent a morning with this guy? You check your wallet?”
Tatyana found the exchange humorous. She asked Julio, “You’ll be okay here for a while?”
The grin partly resurfaced. “If it means another ride with you, sure thing.”
“I don’t know how long we’ll be.”
“No problem.”
Jerry said, “Guys that deal in stolen goods, they generally don’t live by the clock.”
Wayne snapped, “I said enough.”
Jerry started into the house, then turned back to say, “I got your number, ese.”
Tatyana gave Wayne’s sweaty form a swift up and down. “I was hoping for something a little more formal.”
“I’ll be right back.”
Jerry was still banging around the kitchen when Wayne finished showering and dressing. He walked outside to find Julio in full slouch mode, sullenly determined to ignore the glares Jerry was casting through the front window. Wayne said to Julio, “Let’s take a walk.”
He was aimed at the maintenance shed, hoping the caretaker might be open to a bribe, when Victoria pushed through her screen door and demanded, “Who do we have here?”
“This is Julio.”
Victoria began pattering off in Spanish, even faster than Tatyana. The kid responded with a smile so huge his entire face was transformed. One minute a card-carrying member of the Crips, another and he was just a big-boned kid.
Victoria sighed with genuine pleasure. “I can’t thank you enough, Wayne.”
“Eilene asked if I could maybe …”
But the old lady was already waving him away and Julio inside, all in one grand gesture. “I missed this young man before we even met.”
Something about the way Tatyana handled the car left Wayne wondering if she was showing off for his benefit. Which was more than a tad odd, since she had given him nothing except ice. But the longer he sat in the passenger seat with his tail almost dragging on the asphalt, the more certain he became. Maybe it was a female thing, wanting to show the jock she had what it took to handle the machine. Whatever the reason, he enjoyed it. The car was so low it made their speed seem even faster than it really was, which was already enough to stutter his heart. At the light leading to the causeway she was first in line. A lowrider with a pair of gardener’s helpers drew up next to her and rattled the exhaust. A Hispanic teen leaned out his window and shouted something that was almost lost to the noise of two rumbling engines. Tatyana called back something that caused the other driver to rev his motor way past redline. Tatyana burned a quarter-moon of rubber onto the bridge and hit a hundred in second gear.
They headed north on A1A, flying through the two-lane traffic like the lanes and the double-yellow lines were laid out for mortals. She handled the road and the machine with the tight economy of a woman born to speed. The coastal highway opened up beyond the Vero city limits, rimmed by walls of welltended green. Here and there Wayne spied fleeting images of seaside mansions and condos in wedding-cake pastels. Tatyana downshifted and took the turn to John’s Island in a controlled four-wheel spin. And kept slowing when the gate arm blocking the entrance did not rise.
A grizzled veteran with worn tattoos and an expression to match Jerry’s came out of the central guard house.
Wayne figured the beefy guard was going to give Tatyana as serious a warning as he could without drawing his gun. Instead, he leaned down, stripped off his aviator shades, and asked, “This the guy?”
“Wayne Grusza. This is Officer Coltrane, chief of John’s Island security.”
The cop was also seriously country. “He don’t look like no pencil neck to me.”
“He is—” Tatyana turned and gave him one of her patented slit-eyed inspections. “An investigative accountant.”
The guard chewed on that for a moment, his belt creaking as he shifted his weight. He said to Wayne, “Mr. Grey is a good man. Here on John’s Island, we take care of our own. You hear what I’m saying, Mister Accountant?”
“Loud and clear.”
He had watery blue eyes that floated in a web of red. “You tell Mr. Grey he needs anything, he’s got my number.”