BY NINE O’CLOCK, VIKKI HILL could feel the walls of the Murmuring Surf’s efficiency closing in on her, so she walked down the beach to Gianni’s, the Italian joint Ava DeCurtis had recommended.
It was a small place, located at the end of a strip shopping center with a nail salon, a dry cleaner’s, and a liquor store. She opened the heavily carved wooden door and was welcomed with the scent of garlic, onions, and red sauce.
The hostess was busy, so Vikki looked around. It was a narrow room, fairly dark, with a wall of red leatherette booths facing the bar. The décor ran to heavily stuccoed walls with cheesy frescoes that she guessed were supposed to be Italian villages. The arched entrance to the crowded dining room was framed with a pair of gigantic fake olive trees draped with straw-wrapped Chianti bottles and clumps of green plastic grapes. The tables were topped with red-and-white-checked vinyl tablecloths and more Chianti bottles with candles stuck in them.
It was like a scene straight out of Lady and the Tramp, and she halfway expected to see a cocker spaniel and a mutt sharing a plate of spaghetti and meatballs.
The hostess, a rail-thin woman with fake eyelashes like dead spiders, approached. “Sorry, hon, we’re awful busy tonight. There’s a thirty-minute wait, unless you want to sit at the bar.”
“The bar’s fine,” Vikki told her.
She actually always preferred to eat at the bar when she was out of town, not because she was such a big drinker, but because it felt less awkward than sitting at a table for two or four and explaining to the servers that she’d be dining alone tonight. Again.
“Get you a drink?” The bartender was Hispanic and twenty-something.
“Yeah. Do you have a really dry red Merlot?”
“So dry you’ll spit dust,” he said. “Will you be dining with us tonight?” He offered her a menu, she took it, glanced at it, and nodded.
“I’ll have the pasta with bolognese and a house salad with vinaigrette dressing. No black olives, okay?”
“Never.”
He came back with the wine and a setting of flatware, and she was taking her first sip when the door opened. Joe DeCurtis stood there for a moment, looking around. He spotted her and walked over.
“Eating alone?”
She nodded.
“Me too. Mind if I join you?”
“Okay by me,” Vikki said.
The bartender was back. “Hey Joe, what’s shakin’?”
“Nothing much. What’s the special tonight?”
“Baked snapper. Just came off the boat this afternoon. Sautéed zucchini and tomatoes, and gnocchi. Sound good?”
“Perfect. And a glass of the Barolo I like in the meantime, okay?”
Vikki raised an eyebrow. “Barolo. I don’t know too many cops who know anything about wine. I’m impressed.”
“I wasn’t always a cop. I worked for a wine distributorship for a year or so, after college.”
“Good for you.”
The waiter brought his wine; he sniffed, tasted it, then nodded his approval. “I take it you didn’t hear from Wingfield today?”
“No.” She frowned. “I don’t like it.”
“I don’t like it either. Did you reach out to that detective back in New York?”
“Yeah. He said he’d show up at Wingfield’s place first thing in the morning and rattle his cage. Nothing else I can do, right?”
He sighed. “Yeah.”
“How’s Letty holding up? She looked pretty tense this morning.”
“‘Tense’ is one word for it,” Joe said.
“You two have something going on?”
He gave her a sheepish grin. “Not as far as she’s concerned. I like her, but she says she wants to keep it strictly professional. Probably just as well.”
The bartender slid a napkin-wrapped basket of warm breadsticks in front of them.
“Tell me about Evan Wingfield,” he said, as she broke one of the sticks in two and slathered butter on it.
“He’s not your typical entitled asshole. He grew up in New Jersey, upper-middle-class family, but not rich, got a business degree from Rutgers, moved to the city, and by the time he was twenty-two, he’d borrowed enough money from his grandfather to buy his first apartment. He lies about his background, by the way,” Vikki Hill said. “Tells people he’s Ivy League, inherited money, blah, blah. It’s all bullshit.”
Joe swirled the wine in his glass. “How’d he get rich so fast?”
“He’s smart. He got a job working for a bottom-feeder real estate investor, and that guy taught him some stuff, eventually began loaning him money to make his own deals. When the real estate market tanked in 2007, he scooped up several distressed properties.” Agent Hill nibbled at her breadstick. “And he’s so crooked, if he ate a nail, he’d shit a corkscrew.”
Joe DeCurtis snorted, then dabbed his face with his napkin. “If he’s so smart, how did he get on the FBI’s radar?”
“He bribed some low-level civil servants who weren’t so smart,” she said. “And when he paid off a couple of city council members to vote his way on zoning issues, that got our attention, and the bureau’s public corruption unit, where I work, got involved. We’ve had a secret grand jury empaneled, and they’ve indicted the council members. Now we’re gunning for Wingfield.”
“Okay. We know he’s smart, and usually careful. Do you really think he’s gonna fall for this fake hit-man scam you’ve cooked up?”
Vikki Hill rested her elbows on the counter and considered the question. “Yeah,” she said finally. “The stakes are higher than they’ve ever been for him before. Bribes are one thing, murder’s a whole different ball game. Letty is a loose end he can’t afford to ignore.”
“Have you considered what happens if he decides to take his business someplace else?”
“He won’t.”
“But what if he does?”
The bartender arrived with their food. “Hot plate,” he said, pointing to the platter of pasta. Agent Hill attacked it with her fork, spearing the pasta noodles, then winding them around her fork. She chewed rapidly, nodded her approval, then turned to her companion.
“You’ve got it bad for this chick, don’t you?”
He stared down at his own plate. “Maybe I do. Or maybe I’m not used to losing control of a situation to an FBI agent I just met twenty-four hours ago. I mean, Letty is living and working at my mother’s motel. She’s got a four-year-old child. I’m just pointing out that a lot could go wrong.”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh Christ. Here it is. The girl thing again. I bet you’d trust me more if I was Agent Victor Hill. Right?”
“No!”
Vikki patted his arm. “Keep telling yourself that, DeCurtis. It’s okay. I’m used to it by now.” She pointed at his plate. “Eat your dinner before it gets cold. And then I’ll tell you how I think this thing is gonna go down. And you can go back to sleeping in your truck outside her motel room.”
“You saw that, huh?”
“I see everything. It’s my job.”
Agent Hill polished off her entrée and pushed her plate away. “Okay. Let’s talk. If I don’t hear back from Wingfield in the next twenty-four hours, obviously we have to assume something went wrong and regroup. We’ve applied for a wiretap for his phone, but judges are moving slower these days on electronic surveillance. If it comes to that, we’ll probably move Letty and Maya, out of an abundance of caution.”
“Are you talking about protective custody?”
“It probably won’t come to that,” she said. “Let me remind you, this is a huge step for Wingfield. We don’t think he actually planned Tanya’s murder. It seems like more of a crime of passion, or opportunity. Yeah, he wanted her off his payroll, but at no time did he ever mention violence to me. As far as we know, he doesn’t have a lot of acquaintances in the criminal world.”
“As far as you know,” Joe said pointedly. “There’s a wild card in this situation, you know.”
“You mean Declan Rooney?”
He nodded. “I ran a search on him. There are still warrants out for him in a couple different jurisdictions around Florida, but he seems to have flown off the radar. Do the feds know anything about his whereabouts?”
Vikki Hill chewed on the end of a breadstick. “No.”
“Does that mean you don’t know, or the feds don’t know, or you know but can’t acknowledge that you know where Rooney is?”
“Sometimes, Joe, a no is just a no,” she said. She glanced at her phone, which was sitting on the bar top beside her, then drained her wineglass and gestured to the bartender for her check. “Gotta go. See you back at the motel, right?”
“Maybe. You’ll call me as soon as you know something, right? I’m taking PTO for the next couple days, so I’ll be around.”
Letty awoke with a start. It was still pitch-black outside. Ten after two in the morning. She got out of bed and checked on Maya, who was still sleeping. She heard it then, a faint sound, like metal scraping on metal. Her heart thudded in her chest.
She crept into the living room, moved the curtain aside, and peeked out the front window. The breezeway outside the unit was empty. Beyond, in the parking lot, Midnight, the motel’s pregnant resident black cat, slunk into the shadows. She exhaled slowly and stood still, listening.
The faint skriiiiccch sound repeated, and her heart beat even faster. Letty stepped into the darkness and moved slowly toward the sliding glass door, her legs trembling so badly she was amazed she couldn’t hear her knees knocking together. It was nothing, she told herself, a leaf scraping against a window screen. The curtains were partially open, allowing a sliver of light to fall onto the floor, and she silently cursed herself for forgetting to draw them before she’d gone to bed.
Had she remembered to lock the slider? She took two steps forward and stopped in her tracks when she saw something move on the patio. She leaned forward again and peeked outside.
Someone was there! A dark figure, barely moving, reclining on one of the metal patio chairs, his long legs resting on the seat of the other chair. In the moonlight she saw that he had a baseball cap tipped forward, nearly covering his face. But she recognized the jeans-clad legs and the silhouette.
Damn Joe DeCurtis. He was determined to save her, one way or another. She exhaled slowly and felt her pulse drop back down to normal. Her fingers found the latch for the door. She fastened it, then walked briskly back to the bedroom.
Maya mumbled something inaudible, then turned and drifted back to sleep. Letty hesitated, then climbed in beside the child, spooning close to her comforting warmth. She closed her eyes, felt her shoulders relax, and then her neck, and then her legs. She grudgingly admitted that for the first time that day, she felt safe.