Tropical Swap (Key West Capers Book 10) Read online

  That was when he heard a soft but rhythmic sequence—shuffle, creak; shuffle, creak—that he felt could only be footsteps in the living room below. The quiet but insistent beat came three times, four times, and as the pictured footsteps drew nearer, all trace of calm was swept out of Peter’s mind by a flooding tide of sickening fear made even more bitter by a jolt of self-mockery and self-blame: A benign, safe little town—ha! This was what happened when you relented in your paranoia, when you relaxed your vigilance even for a moment. He reached over and shook Meg by the shoulder.

  Her response was just a sleepy, “Hm?”

  He shook her again then brought his face very close to hers and said in a choked whisper, “Wake up. There’s someone in the house.”

  His tone jarred her into full alertness and for a moment they just sat together in the dark, a tangled sheet around their legs, listening and dreading.

  From below there came more sounds: Objects being bumped, something being placed on a tabletop or counter.

  Peter whispered, “It’s the guy who broke the window, made the threats. Shit. We shouldn’t have stayed here. I knew we shouldn’t have. We should’ve bolted. He’s here to kill someone.”

  Meg’s only answer was to tug her husband’s arm so that he followed her as she slid silently onto the floor at the side of the bed that was farthest from the bedroom door. The two of them cowered there behind the mattress, kneeling like children at their prayers. Peter fought back a shameful impulse to weep. Somewhere deep in the dark center of his lifelong nervousness there had always been a certainty that a moment like this would come—a moment of crisis to which he would not be equal, a moment when he would miserably fail to meet a danger and therefore be destroyed. Well, goddamn it, destroyed he might be—tied up with duct tape, shot by mistake—but he wouldn’t quail and he wouldn’t go down without a fight.

  Footsteps began ascending the unlighted stairway from the living room.

  Meg kissed her husband on the cheek. She whispered, “Whatever happens, Peter, I love you.”

  “I love you too,” he said, and as he said the simple words he also formed a stratagem. There was a small lamp on the nightstand. He disconnected it and grabbed it with a sweating hand. Something to throw.

  The footsteps continued, coming closer. Outside, palms rustled, toads bleated, crickets rasped. The noises blended, seeming to become infernally loud, amplified by the rush of blood coursing deep inside Meg’s and Peter’s ears.

  The footsteps paused; the intruder must have reached the landing.

  Peter tried to shout; he couldn’t. It was like that moment in a nightmare when you try to scream but nothing happens. He begged his throat to open, and finally, in a tone he wished was more authoritative, he managed to call out, “Stop! Don’t come any closer. I have a gun.”

  There was a pause. The landing was dark. The bedroom was dark. The silence seemed to quell the other night sounds and to last a long time.

  Finally, emboldened by the sound of his own voice and by the fragile hope that his bluff was working, Peter went on. “And listen, you’re wasting your time here. I’m not Benny Bufano and I don’t know where he is.”

  Meg, nestled up against her husband’s side, called out, “And I’m not Glenda.”

  There was another pause. This one somehow carried the suggestion of befuddlement, of a mythic riddle being pondered.

  Then a voice from the landing said, “Fuckin’ A, you’re not Glenda. Because I am. So who the fuck are you?”

  Without further hesitation Glenda strode into the bedroom on her platform shoes and switched on a light. In the sudden glare she saw that her bed was all messed up and that two naked strangers were kneeling on the floor with a sheet around their shoulders. Her glance eventually settled on Peter’s right arm and she said rather dismissively, “You have a gun, huh? Bullshit, you have a gun. You have a lamp.”

  Peter had sort of forgotten he had the projectile in his hand. Sheepishly, he put it back on the nightstand.

  Meg said to Glenda, “You don’t have a gun either? Or duct tape?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Hon,” said Glenda. “I live here. I’m looking for my cat. I’m looking for my husband. Maybe you two should put some clothes on and tell me what the fuck is going on.”

  10.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said the expert from D.C., addressing an early morning meeting of thirty or so FBI agents, most of whom didn’t want to be there, “the most important thing I have to say to you today comes down to simply this: Forget everything you think you know about the Mob. Forget Don Corleone. Forget Tony Soprano. Forget quaint little crimes like protection rackets, gambling, arson. That was twentieth-century fun and games, and today’s Mafia has moved light years beyond it. How does the Mob make its serious money today? I’ll give it to you in three simple words: white collar crime. Embezzlement from major banks and brokerages that sometimes don’t even know they’ve been robbed of tens of millions. Stock price manipulation and insider trading on an epic scale. Ponzi schemes, rogue hedge funds. That’s where the money is, in the very heart of our financial system. So how does the Mob elbow in to that sphere? Not with baseball bats and handguns. No, the Mob infiltrates with financial expertise and tremendous sophistication in computer technology. Break-ins today don’t happen in people’s homes or place of business; they happen in our computer networks because of security flaws that are exploited by brilliant and amoral hackers in league with savvy but crooked bankers and brokers, who in turn do the bidding of thoroughly modern mobsters who are much smarter than we give them credit for. Today’s Organized Crime—O.C.— has everything to do with I.T., and we ignore that at our peril…”

  The expert from D.C. droned on for another forty minutes, and well before the end of his remarks Special Agent Andy Sheehan had given up on hiding his boredom. He shifted in his crummy metal chair, crossed and re-crossed his inconveniently long legs, and looked away from the speaker, past the cheap blinds on the frosty windows to an uninspiring cityscape in a blighted area of Queens. Sheehan hated being bored, hated it worse than anything except, perhaps, being told how to do his job. When he was bored, resentments sprouted, initially directed toward the person who was boring him but soon spreading wider. At that moment Sheehan’s resentment was largely focused on the room he was sitting in and the office where he’d spent the past nineteen years of his working life. New York’s Organized Crime division was an elite and much-decorated unit; why did the Bureau still hide them away in such a dump? The fluorescent lighting was hideous, chopped up into little squares by cheap fixtures that resembled ice-cube trays. The metal desks reminded him of the ones at the third-rate Catholic school where he’d attended grades K through twelve. And why did the brass keep sending up these mealy-mouthed bureaucrats to lecture career agents as though they were rookies?

  When the talk finally ended, Andy grabbed Lou Duncan, one of the few guys on the squad he still really liked, and they went across the street to the Greek joint for a coffee. Stoic men and proud of it, they were the only people in the place who weren’t wearing topcoats. They slid into a booth at the back and Duncan asked Sheehan what he’d thought of the presentation.

  Predictably, Sheehan said it was total bullshit.

  “Not total,” Duncan disagreed. He was African-American, with skin that was almost more gray than brown and slightly pitted on his cheeks. He had a deep, soft, gravelly voice, a mild and unruffled manner, and a general approach to life and work that favored nuance over absolutes. “I mean,” he went on, “can’t disagree that the real money’s in white-collar stuff.”

  “Sure, sure,” said Sheehan, “but we didn’t need some suit from Washington to tell us that. The part’s that bullshit is saying that these guys we’ve been chasing all these years aren’t knuckleheads anymore, that they’ve suddenly become rocket scientists because they know how to work an iPad.”

  Duncan sipped some coffee and said mildly, “They are smarter than they used to be. Relatively speaking.
”

  “So this means we fight back with computers? Makes me sick,” said Sheehan. “What does the Bureau fund these days? What’s the recruiting about? What’s the training about? Cyber-this and cyber-that. So we end up with wimps who think police work happens in front of a computer screen instead of on the street, who’d shit in their pants at the idea of going undercover—“

  “Guys still do that,” Duncan pointed out.

  “Fewer and fewer. And hardly ever the young guys.” This was a sore point with Sheehan, one of many when it came to recent changes at the Bureau. He’d always had a firm but brittle sense of how things should be done, and he’d never wavered in the conviction that his way was the right way. This unflagging certainty showed in everything about him. His posture was ramrod straight, with none of the shrinking or slouching one often saw in men who were six-foot four. The gaze from his pale blue eyes was direct but generally squeezed into a narrow beam, always looking for something fishy. His square chin jutted slightly as though he was daring someone to disagree with him. But for all his breathtaking confidence, even he had noticed lately that certain things were being done differently around the office, different things were being honored. It hurt him and drove him a little bit crazy that now, so close to the end of his career, his way of being a cop was no longer esteemed as the highest and the most effective way.

  A waitress came over and sloshed more coffee in their cups. By the time she walked away Sheehan’s tone had shifted from complaint to resolve. “But let me tell you something we both already know. The Mob is not run by computer. The Mob is run by guys who are still mostly knuckleheads. Have they figured a few things out? Of course. But by baby steps. Have they muscled in on new businesses? Sure. But they run them a lot like they ran the old businesses. This is what that schmuck expert doesn’t understand. Even with the white collar stuff—“

  Duncan slowed him down with a lift of a long-fingered hand. He said, “Wait a second. Why are you all wound up about this? I thought you weren’t even working any white collar stuff.”

  “I’m not,” said Sheehan. “Officially.”

  “Oh Christ, Andy. Don’t tell me you’re going cowboy again.”

  “Cowboy? No. Freelance, maybe.”

  “Shit. The last time you went freelance—“

  “What? The last time I landed the Underboss of the Bonnano family.”

  “After almost getting killed. Almost getting suspended. Almost ending up in fucking jail.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t. And the job got done.”

  Duncan considered that, sipped some coffee. “Andy, how old are you now? Fifty?”

  “Forty-nine.”

  “Like, eight months from a pension?”

  “Six, but who’s counting.”

  “Six months,” said Duncan with his smooth, calm voice. “Most guys would be laying low, taking care of paperwork, running out the clock. You, you gotta go out with a bang or a thud.”

  Sheehan didn’t bother trying to deny it. “I’ve made a little bet with myself,” he said. “A hundred bucks. Want to get in on the action?”

  “I don’t gamble,” said Lou Duncan. “You know that.”

  “Here’s the bet. There’s a guy in the office, Evan LeFroy—“

  “Sure, I know Evan—“

  “--A young brainy guy who thinks he can take down mobsters while sitting at his keyboard with his dick in one hand and a latte in the other. For months, all hush-hush, he’s been tracking a crooked trader named Marc Orlovsky.”

  “If it’s so hush-hush, how come you know about it?” Duncan asked.

  By instinct Sheehan quickly scanned the luncheonette for eavesdroppers then leaned low across his coffee cup. “I know because I read his files.”

  Even the mild Duncan was exercised by this. “You read another agent’s private files? Are you crazy?”

  Sheehan did not address the question. Instead, he said, “Some computer maven. Big security and encryption expert. He goes out for long lunches and leaves his logged-on laptop right there on his desk.”

  “Guess he trusts his colleagues.”

  Sheehan let that pass. “So here’s the story. This dirtbag Orlovsky has been making killer trades. Big trades. Consistently. Either he’s got the world’s best Ouija board or he’s using insider information. Where’s he getting it? Who’s he working for? This wuss LeFroy thinks he can figure it out and get a big promotion while sitting at his desk and analyzing data. Fucking data! Fucking graphs! While sitting on his lazy ass. Can you believe that shit?”

  “Yeah. I can. Totally.”

  “You’re supposed to say you can’t. Doesn’t matter. Anyway, I’m taking a different approach.”

  “It’s not your case,” Duncan pointed out.

  “A very basic approach,” Sheehan said. “Law Enforcement 101. I’ve started tailing this Orlovsky.”

  “On your own? Without authorization?”

  “Free country. I’m allowed to be curious. I’m allowed to walk behind somebody.”

  “Some people call that stalking.”

  “Only if it’s badly done. But in the meantime I’ve got a bet to win. I’ve bet myself a hundred bucks I catch him first. If I win, I buy myself a first-rate steak dinner. If I lose, the money goes to Catholic Charities.” He finished the last of his coffee then added, “You’re the only who knows this, Lou.”

  “How’d I get so lucky?”

  “Questions come up, where I am, what I’m doing, you’ll cover for me, right?”

  “Shit,” said Duncan. “As far as I can. You know I will.”

  “Thanks. Might even share that steak with you.”

  “You haven’t won it yet.”

  “I will,” said Sheehan. “I will.”

  11.

  Glenda had spent the night of her return to Key West as a guest in her own house.

  Utterly drained by the long drive down from Naples, and by the crushing disappointment of not finding Benny at home in their long-shared bed, and by the bewilderment of discovering two quailing strangers there in his place, she’d decided to save any but the sketchiest of explanations for another day and had simply gone downstairs to sleep in the spare bedroom with its seldom used and slightly musty mattress. It felt odd to be bivouacked there, bizarre in fact; but human beings are almost infinitely adaptable, and all it took was a decent night’s sleep to serve as transition from a situation that seemed totally untenable and completely weird to one that passed for a new if temporary phase of normal. By breakfast next day, Glenda and Meg and Peter were behaving, if not exactly like old friends, at least like thrown-together roommates who were determined to get along and be considerate.

  One by one, all of them still a little bleary-eyed with sleep, they’d straggled into the kitchen in slippers and robes and gone about the ordinary business of starting the day. Meg squeezed oranges. Peter sliced bananas onto bowls of cereal. Glenda made toast. Before the women had had their coffee and Peter his carefully dosed out sips of tea there was very little conversation.

  But when they’d moved out into the sunshine and were sitting at the small table near the pool, Meg, with a wry flourish, raised her glass of orange juice and said, “So. Well. Here we are.”

  Tardily but with a sleepy smile, Glenda raised her own glass and they clinked. “Here we are,” she agreed.

  Here we are? thought Peter. Well, just where the hell was that? Tweaked by his nervousness, he needed to get a few things figured out immediately. “Look,” he blurted, “this is really pretty awkward and I don’t know what we should do.”

  “Maybe we should have our breakfast,” said his wife.

  “I mean,” Peter said to Glenda, “your husband’s supposedly at our place in New York, but we can’t find him. You apparently can’t find him either. In the meantime it’s not right we’re inconveniencing you. But it’s high season here and I don’t think we could find a hotel room even if we wanted to. So I just don’t know what we should do. Maybe we should just leave after breakf
ast.”

  Glenda was eating some cereal and for a moment said nothing. Without her high shoes, and with her rather big hair flattened by the pillow, she really wasn’t much taller than average. Nor, in the light of morning, did she look like any sort of tough-talking, vase-throwing Mafia moll. Her makeup was gone except for a random smudge of lipstick and her unadorned face was soft and almost girlish. She mostly kept her eyes down and actually seemed a little bashful. Finally, she said simply, “There’s no need for you to leave. I like it that you’re here.”

  She said it softly, humbly, as if she was asking a favor rather than stating a fact, and it didn’t quite seem to register with Peter.

  “At the very least,” he went on in a businesslike way, “we should swap rooms until we can figure out another plan. You should have the master. I mean, it’s your house, after all.”

  Glenda put down her spoon and her eyes welled up. She briefly looked around the yard. The skyflower and the allamanda were in bloom. The frangipani tree in the corner had sprouted a single pink blossom on a naked stump of limb. She said, “It doesn’t feel like my house right now. Benny isn’t here. The cat isn’t here. It just doesn’t feel like home.”

  Peter had no idea what to say to that. Meg responded not with a word but a gesture; she put a comforting hand on Glenda’s wrist. That light touch was enough to earn Glenda’s eternal trust and gratitude, to let her feel she’d found a friend, and all the things she hadn’t got around to talking about the night before suddenly came pouring out.

  “You know,” she said, “the whole ride down the Keys I was imagining how I’d surprise my Benny. I’d sneak into the house, come up the stairs in the dark, stop outside the bedroom door. Probably I’d hear him snoring. I’d tiptoe closer so I could smell him. He smells like bread when he’s asleep. I don’t know why. He doesn’t smell like bread when he’s awake. When he’s asleep he smells like bread. It never even dawned on me that maybe he wouldn’t be here. I never thought that for a second. I hate not knowing where he is.”