Last to die Read online

  “You are a total wreck,” she said to her reflection.

  She brushed off as much of the toilet paper as she could, fixed her makeup, and said the hell with it. Nothing was going to stop this meeting from happening. She took a deep breath for courage and exited into the bar.

  The crowd surprised her, not so much its makeup, which was about what she’d expected, but more the simple fact that there was such a big crowd on a nasty night like this. A group of truckers was playing black-jack by the jukebox. Leather-clad bikers and their bleached-blond girlfriends had a monopoly on the pool table, as if waiting out the storm. T-shirts, jeans, and flannel shirts seemed to be the dress code for a seat at the bar. These folks were hard-core, and this was clearly a place that depended on its regulars.

  “Can I help you, miss?” the bartender asked.

  “Not just yet, thanks. I’m looking for someone.”

  “Yeah? Who?”

  Sally hesitated, not exactly sure how to answer that. “Just, uh, sort of a blind date.”

  “That must be Jimmy,” said one of the men at the bar.

  The others laughed. Sally smiled awkwardly, the inside joke completely lost on her. The bartender explained, “Jimmy’s the umpire in our softball league. They don’t come any blinder.”

  “Ah, I get it,” she said. They laughed again at this Jimmy’s expense. Sally broke away and continued across the bar before their interest could return to the lost girl in the wet clothes. Her gaze fixed on the third booth from the back, near the broken air-hockey table. A black guy with penetrating eyes and no smile was staring back at her. He was wearing a dark blue shirt with black pants, which made Sally smile to herself. Never before had she laid eyes on him, but his look and those clothes were exactly what he’d described over the telephone. It was him.

  She walked toward the booth and said, “I’m Sally.”

  “I know.”

  “How’d you-” she started to ask, then stopped. There wasn’t a woman in the joint who looked like her.

  “Have a seat,” he said.

  She slid into the booth and sat across from him. “Sorry I’m late. Raining like crazy.”

  He reached across the table and plucked a shred of toilet paper from her sleeve. “What’s it raining now, fake snow?”

  “That’s toilet paper.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Long story,” she said. “It was all over me. Five minutes ago I looked like a milkweed.”

  “With breasts.”

  She folded her arms across her chest. “Yes, well. Some things can’t be helped.”

  “You want something to drink?”

  “No, thank you.”

  He swirled the ice cubes around in his half-empty glass. Rum and Coke, she guessed, since that was the special of the night. The Coke looked completely flat, about what she expected from Sparky’s.

  “I watched you drive up,” he said. “Nice car.”

  “If you like cars.”

  “I do. From the looks of things, you do, too.”

  “Not really. My husband did.”

  “You mean your second husband or your first?”

  She shifted uncomfortably. They hadn’t discussed her marital status on the telephone. “My second.”

  “The French one?”

  “What did you do, check up on me?”

  “I check on all my clients.”

  “I’m not your client yet.”

  “You will be. Rarely do the ones who look like you come this far and back down.”

  “How do you mean, look like me?”

  “Young. Rich. Gorgeous. Pissed off.”

  “You call this gorgeous?”

  “I’m assuming this isn’t your best look.”

  “Fair assumption.”

  “What about the pissed-off part. That fair, too?”

  “I’m not really pissed off.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “I don’t see how my feelings are at all relevant. The only thing that matters is whether you want to do business, Mr.-whatever your name is.”

  “You can call me Tatum.”

  “That your name?”

  “Nickname.”

  “Like Tatum O’Neal?”

  He grimaced, sucking down his drink. “No, not like fucking Tatum O’Neal. Tatum like Jack Tatum.”

  “Who’s Jack Tatum?”

  “Meanest football player that ever lived. Defensive back, Oakland Raiders. He’s the guy who popped Darryl Stingley and turned him quadriplegic. They used to call him Assassin. Hell, he liked to call himself Assassin.”

  “Is that what you call yourself, too? Assassin?”

  He leaned into the table, his expression turning very serious. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

  She was about to answer, but the bartender was suddenly standing beside their booth. He glared at Sally and said, “What you meetin’ with this guy for?”

  “Excuse me?” she said.

  “This piece of dirt sittin’ on the other side of the table. What you meetin’ with him for?”

  She looked at Tatum, then back at the bartender. “That’s really none of your business.”

  “This is my bar. It’s definitely my business.”

  Tatum spoke up. “Theo, just put a cork in it, will you?”

  “I want you out of here.”

  “Ain’t finished my drink yet.”

  “You got five minutes,” said Theo. “Then be gone.” He turned and walked back to his place behind the bar.

  “What’s with him?” asked Sally.

  “Tightass. Guy finds some lawyer to get him off death row, thinks he’s better ’n everyone else.”

  “You don’t think he knows what we’re here talking about, do you?”

  “Hell no. He probably thinks I’m pimping you.”

  Her rain-soaked blouse suddenly felt even more clingy. “I guess I brought that on myself.”

  “Never mind him. Let’s cut the crap and get down to it.”

  “I didn’t bring any money.”

  “Naturally. I didn’t give you a price yet.”

  “How much is it going to be?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “How complicated the job is.”

  “What do you need to know?”

  “For starters, what exactly do you want? Two broken ribs? A concussion? Stitches? Mess with his face, don’t mess with his face? I can put the guy in the hospital for a month, if you want.”

  “I want more than that.”

  “More?”

  She looked one way, then the other, as if to make sure they were alone. “I want this person dead.”

  Tatum didn’t answer.

  She said, “How much for that?”

  He burrowed his tongue into his cheek, thinking, as if sizing her up all over again. “That depends, too.”

  “On what?”

  “Well, who’s your target?”

  She lowered her eyes, then looked straight at him. “You’re not going to believe it.”

  “Try me.”

  She almost chuckled, then shook it off. “I’m way serious. You are really not going to believe it.”

  Two

  Her day had finally arrived.

  Sally felt a rush of adrenaline as she sat at her kitchen table enjoying her morning coffee. No cream, two packs of artificial sweetener. A toasted plain bagel with no butter or cream cheese, just a side of raspberry preserves that went untouched. A small glass of juice, fresh-squeezed from the pink grapefruit that her gardener had handpicked from the tree in her backyard. It was her usual weekday breakfast, and today was to be no different from any other.

  Except that today, she knew, would change everything.

  “More coffee, ma’am?” asked Dinah, her live-in domestic.

  “No, thank you.” She laid her newspaper aside and headed upstairs to the bedroom. The house had two large master suites on the second story. Hers was on the east side, facing the bay, decorat
ed in an airy, British Colonial style that was reminiscent of the Caribbean islands. His was on the west, a much darker room with wood-beamed ceilings and an African motif. Sally didn’t like all the dead animals on the walls, so they used his room only when he wasn’t abroad, which was about every other month for their entire eighteen months of marriage. The arrangement had lasted just long enough for her to reach the first financial milestone of an elaborate prenuptial agreement. Eighteen months equaled eighteen million dollars, plus the house-big money for Sally, chump change for Jean Luc Trudeau. Lucky for her, she’d had the foresight to take the eighteen million not in cash but in stock in her husband’s company, which promptly went public and-kaboom!-she was suddenly worth forty-six million dollars. She could have earned another quarter-million for each additional month, and there were certainly worse men to be married to than Jean Luc. He was rich, successful, reasonably handsome, and plenty generous to his third and much younger wife. But Sally wasn’t happy. People said she was never happy. She didn’t apologize for that. She had her reasons.

  Sally stepped into her dressing room, draped her robe over the back of a chair, and pulled on a pair of sheer panty hose. Naked from the waist up, she stood in silence before the three-way mirror. Slowly, she raised both arms, her twenty-nine-year-old body seeming to defy the pull of gravity as she turned. In the full-length panel she saw it, still visible after all this time. A two-inch pink scar at the base of the rib cage. She felt it with the tips of her fingers, lightly at first, then touching more firmly, and finally pressing until it hurt, as if she were trying to stop the bleeding all over again. Years later, and it was still there. Cosmetic surgery could have hidden it, but that would only have destroyed her most important daily reminder that she had in fact survived the attack. Sadly, her first marriage had not survived.

  Tragically, neither had her daughter.

  “Anything to iron today, Miss Sally?”

  Instinctively, she covered her breasts at the sound of a voice, but she was alone in the dressing room. Dinah was waiting on the other side of the closed door.

  “I don’t think so,” she answered, pulling on her robe.

  As the sound of Dinah’s footsteps faded away, Sally opened the door and walked to the bathroom to fix her hair and makeup. She returned to the dressing room to select an outfit, which took longer than usual, as she wanted it to be just right. She settled on a basic blue Chanel suit with a peach blouse and new Ferragamo shoes, finishing the look with a strand of pearls with matching earrings. Her platinum and diamond wedding band-two rows of stones for a total of four karats-felt like overkill, as always, but she wore it anyway. She thought she’d put it away for good with the divorce, but today it served a purpose.

  Sally stepped back and took one last look in the mirror-a good, long look. For the first time in ages, she allowed herself a trace of a genuine smile.

  This is your day, girl.

  She grabbed her purse and headed downstairs, leaving through the front doors to the porte cochere, where her Mercedes convertible was parked and waiting with the top down. Her hair was secure in a French twist, but she nevertheless donned the Princess Grace look, a white scarf and dark sunglasses. She climbed behind the wheel, started the engine, and followed the brick driveway to the iron gate. It opened automatically, and she exited to the street.

  She drove at a leisurely pace through her neighborhood, the warm south Florida sun on her face. It was a glorious day, even by Miami standards. Seventy degrees, relatively low humidity, a cloudless blue sky. Growing up as a girl, she’d always wanted to live in the Venetian Isles. They sat side by side in the bay, like four giant stepping-stones between the mainland and the larger island of Miami Beach proper. Homes on the waterfront were a boater’s dream, many with drop-dead views of cruise ships in port and the colorful skyline of downtown Miami beyond. Technically speaking, it was her dream come true to have a nine-thousand-square-foot house in the midst of this urban paradise.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  Sally stopped to pay the toll, then continued across the Venetian Causeway. A couple of old Cuban men were fishing on the Miami side of the bridge, right beneath the sign that read ABSOLUTELY NO FISHING.

  She was just north of downtown Miami, not exactly the safest part of town, but it was an area in transition. In the not-too-distant past, she would have driven miles out of her way to avoid cutting through here.

  She crossed Biscayne Boulevard, made a couple of quick turns, and stopped at the traffic light. The entrance ramp to the interstate was just ahead, the lone escape route to about a dozen east-west lanes perched directly above her. She could hear the expressway traffic, the steady drone of countless cars and noisy trucks echoing all around her.She usually timed her approach so that she could breeze through with no red lights, especially at night, but that wasn’t always possible. Like clockwork, the homeless guys emerged from their cardboard homes beneath the on-ramp. Armed with tattered rags and plastic squirt bottles filled with dirty water, they seemed determined to clean the world’s windshields. There were two of them. One came toward her, and the other went to the SUV in front of her.

  The SUV burned rubber and ran the red light, leaving Sally alone at the intersection, just her and the window washers. It was mid-morning, but in the dark shadows it seemed like dusk. Interstate 395 and the ramps that fed into it crisscrossed overhead like concrete ribbons. Sally’s window washer took a different strategy than the guy with the SUV, approaching not from the side but from the front of the vehicle. She couldn’t have run the red light without running over him.

  “No thanks,” she shouted.

  He kept coming, smiling, taking aim with his squirt bottle. The other washer returned to his home beneath the ramp, apparently having conceded the Mercedes to his competition.

  “I said, ‘No thanks.’”

  He walked all the way up to the front of her car, standing close enough to snap off her hood ornament. Suddenly, the darkness seemed to break. They were surrounded by scattered beams of sunshine, as if the clouds had shifted just enough to allow patches of daylight to break through the crevices in the maze-like expressway overhead. The longest, brightest ray seemed to fix on her big diamond ring. It was sparkling like fireworks. On any other day, she might have discreetly slid her hand from atop the steering wheel and dropped it in her lap. But not today.

  The man was still staring at her through the windshield. Then, slowly, he raised his arm and took aim, straight at her face. She waited for the stream of greasy water to hit the glass, but it didn’t come. A moment later, she realized that he wasn’t holding a squirt bottle.

  She froze, her eyes fixed on the black hole at the end of the polished metal barrel. It lasted only a split second, but it was as if she were suddenly floating outside her own body, watching the scene unfold. In her mind’s eye, she could see the flash of powder from the barrel, see the windshield shatter, see her head snapping back, her body slumping forward, and the spray of blood on the leather seats. She could even hear the horn blasting as her face hit the steering wheel and came to rest there. And for the second time in the same day, she saw herself smiling a genuine smile.

  With the lonely crack of a revolver that echoed off concrete, her living nightmare was finally over.

  Three

  The sun was setting as Jack Swyteck pulled into his driveway. He lived on Key Biscayne, an island practically in the shadows of downtown Miami, but a world apart. Across the bay, beyond the sprawling metropolis and somewhere over the distant Everglades, fluffy bands of pink, orange, and magenta were slowly dissolving into the darkness of night. It wasn’t until all color had vanished from the sky that it suddenly dawned on him what day it was. Exactly one year to the day that he and Cindy began the separation that ended their five-year marriage in divorce.

  Happy Anniversary, he told himself.

  Jack was a trial lawyer who specialized in criminal defense work, though he was open to just about anything if it interested him. By th
e same token, he turned away cases that he didn’t find interesting, the upshot being that he liked what he did but didn’t make a ton of money doing it. Profit had never been his goal. He had spent his first four years out of law school at the Freedom Institute, a ragtag group of idealists who defended death row inmates. At the time, Jack’s father, Harry Swyteck, was Florida’s law-and-order governor and staunchly pro-death penalty. Jack’s job didn’t sit well with him, but that was sort of the idea. Four years of tweaking his old man proved to be plenty, and in case anyone had written him off as a bleeding heart liberal, he completely shifted gears and made a name for himself as a fair but aggressive federal prosecutor. He left the U.S. attorney’s office on good terms, but almost two years later he was still trying to find his stride in private practice. To be sure, everything from a messy divorce to a dead client in his bathtub had served as “distractions” along the way, and he was determined to give his own firm a fair shot before changing professional course again.

  “Hey, Theo!” he called out across the lawn.

  Theo didn’t seem to hear him. He was busily scrubbing down his twenty-four-foot sport fisherman, which at the moment was suspended by davits and hanging over the water. The one saving grace of Jack’s austere rental house was the fact that it was on the water with its own dock. This was his third rental since the divorce, part of his whirlwind quest to find the perfect digs for a divorced man with no kids, no addictions, and surprisingly little interest in dating. His latest experiment was a “Mackle home,” a simple three-bedroom, one bathroom, cinder-block structure with a small screened-in porch and, of course, no central air conditioning. In the early 1950s, the Mackle brothers built scores of these basic beach homes, mostly for WWII veterans and their young families. Back then, Key Biscayne was little more than a mosquito swamp, so Mackle homes were about the cheapest housing around, with a typical closing price of twelve thousand dollars. Today, the lot alone went for about twelve grand per foot of linear waterfront. It seemed that about every third or fourth day a developer would drop by, aching to enter Jack’s living room with a bulldozer and blueprints. His was the last of the waterfront Mackles still standing.