As Easton Grey opened his office door, a figure as lithe as a seaside sprite scurried down the upstairs hallway. He stared at where her bedroom door clicked shut. “Clara is worried about me.”
Tatyana replied, “Of course she is.”
“She is also very angry. She feels like her world is slipping from her control. Control is as important to her as it is to me. Maybe more. I try to talk to her about faith’s testing times….” He stared at the door. “She’s thirteen. She loves me and she’s angry at me and she feels guilty about her anger.”
Tatyana walked down the carpeted hallway and knocked softly on the door. “Clara?” When there was no reply, she said, “I meant what I said about us talking.”
Tatyana fished in her pocket for one of her cards and wrote on the back. “This is my card. I’m putting my home phone and my cell on the back.” She bent down and slipped it under the door. “I’ll call you tonight. Is that all right?”
Easton led them down the stairs and across the front foyer. He unlocked the front door but did not draw it open. “That was very nice of you.”
Tatyana shook her head. “She’s a wonderful girl.”
“Yes. She is.”
“I understand what she is feeling. If I can, I would like to help.”
Easton opened the door. “I wish—”
Wayne slipped between them. “Hold it there a second.”
The two corporate professionals stared at him. He kept his voice very calm, his manner as nonchalant as he could manage. “Tatyana, take a step back into the foyer. Like you’ve just realized you’ve forgotten something. Easton, go with her.”
“What is it?”
“Just go.” It was the only answer he could give because he had no idea what exactly had triggered his alarm. Sometimes it was like that. A shadow glimpse, a fractional image that did not fit with normal. Staying alive meant responding before the conscious brain formed the final structure.
Wayne stepped outside and raised his arms, as though stretching out a kink. He rolled his head from side to side, scouting the perimeter. He stayed on the top step, as the elevation gave him a bit more scope.
There.
Two men. They were across the street and one house north of the Grey residence. A gardening truck, all the normal gear. The men looked normal as well. One of them up a ladder, working the line of Imperial palms. Call it seventy yards from where Wayne stood. He checked his watch and shook his head. He turned as though calling into the house for Tatyana to hurry, but said, “Stay where you are and don’t come out.”
He inspected the clearing sky as he took the steps and started down the front walk. Looking everywhere but directly at the men.
They wore normal gardening clothes, dirty and old. The truck was battered and draped with gear.
Wayne had worked for several gardening services in his time on the road. Gardeners everywhere had one thing in common: they got paid by the job. Which meant they ran. One of these men was up on a ladder. The other used a curved saw attached to a long pole for trimming off the dead palm fronds. Only the men were not racing. As Wayne crossed the street the guy not on the ladder switched to the next palm. But he moved slow.
Wayne patted his pockets as he crossed the street. “One of you guys got a match?”
Even this close he could not see their faces. Both wore floppy hats with the brims down low and streaks of dirt on their faces like camouflage. As he approached, the guy on the ladder started coming down. The other guy kept on with his sawing. His face remained turned up toward the branches.
Which was how Wayne spotted the pistol.
The gun was jammed far down inside the guy’s belt, with his shirttail out and draped over his waist. But the way he lifted his arms and sawed at the branch drew the sweat-stained shirt into sharp definition over the pistol’s handle. Wayne’s mind automatically sorted the data even as his feet turned him about and started back. A shooter’s pistol, was what he was thinking. A nine mil, fourteen in the dock and one in the chamber. Fourteen more than they would need on him at that range.
“You know what? Forget it. I left my cigs in the car.”
He meandered back, taking it slow, not really aiming for anywhere. Still glancing at the sky and his watch. Calling out for good effect, “You folks found it yet?”
The lady, bless her cautious heart, did not show.
It took him about seventeen years to cross that street. He forced himself not to scratch the hollow itch between his shoulder blades. There was nothing he could do about the growing stain of sweat. The one shaped like a target at the center of his back.
He was midway down the Greys’ front walk when he heard the rattle of a ladder being stowed and the truck cranking up.
In the distance, a siren wailed.
The driver gunned the motor and pulled out fast enough to burn rubber. Wayne kept moving up the steps, slow and easy. Only when the motor disappeared in the emerald distance did he turn around and take his first full breath.
“Tell me again about those men.”
Wayne had been through it twice before. But he did as the John’s Island security chief ordered. “One was six feet one or two, two-twenty, mid-forties. Couldn’t see his hair, and he wore a long-sleeved shirt. Hair on his hands might have been dark or it could have been dirt. He wore sunglasses. His features were thick—might have been either Anglo or Hispanic. The other guy was up a ladder and the perspective wasn’t good. I’d put him at an inch or so shorter than the other guy and much lighter.”
“In other words,” the chief said, “you didn’t see a thing that’ll do us any good.”
“I guess that sums it up.”
“That is, if they weren’t just a couple of guys on the job.”
“They weren’t gardeners,” Wayne replied.
The chief’s radio crackled. He thumbed the mike on his shoulder lapel. “Coltrane.”
The voice on the radio said, “Maintenance reports no crews were scheduled for tree work today.”
Officer Coltrane had eyes of muddy marble. He blinked twice, examining Wayne, then clicked the mike and said, “Swing by the front gate. Find out which gardening crews were checked in.”
“Roger that.”
“Chief out.” He was a thick man, with forearms like beefy clubs below his short-sleeved shirt. “I think we’d all be better having this discussion inside.”
Easton Grey said, “Wayne wants us to stay here on the porch until your men are done.”
Easton Grey’s wife had arrived back about five seconds behind the first security car, whining down the lane like she was on the Daytona track. She stood behind her husband now, clutching her daughter. Easton kept one hand resting lightly upon his wife’s arm. Connected.
The chief did not argue. He glanced across the street to where another of his officers was up a ladder, inspecting the palm where the men had been working. Wayne was not going anywhere until he saw if his hunch was right.
“You say one of them was packing.”
“A pistol under his shirt. Nine mil is my guess.”
“You know enough about small-arms weaponry to identify a pistol by its butt through a shirt?”
Wayne did not shift his focus from the tree. “That’s right. I do.”
The officer up the tree hefted something and called, “Chief!”
The chief moved remarkably fast for such a heavy man. His belt squeaked audibly as he trotted across the street. Wayne was one step behind.
The security officer was a woman with copper skin and the solid look of someone who spent a lot of time fighting off excess poundage. She leaned over and handed the chief a black box about twice the size of his hand. “This was fastened to a branch.”
He turned the box around in his hands. Other than a thumbsized on-off switch, there was nothing to see. “You know what this is?”
“My guess is, a radio-frequency amplifier.” Wayne gestured back toward where Tatyana and the Greys stood on the front porch. “They’ve bugged the house. The mikes have a limited transmission range. This catches the signals and boosts the power enough for them to catch it outside your perimeter.”
Officer Coltrane touched the switch, but did not turn it off. “I can probably tell you how it went. The gardeners, they’re hired by the individual houses and a lot of them don’t speak much English. So if my guy at the front gate don’t know Spanish, he’ll make a note of their tags. If he’s doing his job proper.”
“And if they haven’t got so much dirt on the tags they can’t be read.”
The chief sighed his agreement. “We’re our own township. Most of the time, we operate without outside help. But I can call on just about anybody I like.”
“Somebody needs to sweep the house for bugs.”
“I know that. What I’m asking is, who else do I need to make contact with?” He lowered the box and took aim at Wayne. “That is, assuming there are other police involved in this thing.”
“Right now I don’t know for certain what it is we’re facing. But there’s a homicide detective in the Naples area, Mehan.”
“Homicide.”
“Yes.”
“Clear on the other side of the state.”
“A scam artist operating as a tax accountant bilked a senior community across the bay out of its entire operating budget. Did the same to a lot of the individual families. The guy turned up dead.”
“Did you have anything to do with that?”
“With discovering he was scamming the old folks, yes. With him winding up dead, no.”
The chief returned his gaze to the box. “This Detective Mehan, he’ll vouch for you?”
Wayne hesitated. “I wish I knew.”