Jeff Shelby - Killer Swell

The letter crushed that hope with the force of a hammer to the chin, and it hurt badly.

A person sliding in beside me startled me. So did the gun in my ribs.

Ramon smiled, sitting at my side. “You’ve found Mr. Costilla’s lost package. He will be very grateful.”

Beyond Ramon, I saw the thick-headed man that had driven me to my meeting with Costilla in Tijuana. The outline of a gun under his shirt was well defined.

“You’ve been following me?” I asked, feeling ridiculously novice.

“Yes,” Ramon said. “From a distance, of course. But, you see, Mr. Costilla, he figured you were the guy to help us. Like he told you.”

I shifted on the bench and felt the gun press harder into my ribs.

Ramon nodded at the letter. “May I?”

I handed it to him. He read it quickly, then handed it back. “I guess I will only need the bag, unless there is anything else in there you need.”

I shook my head. I didn’t want to give up the money, but I knew the letter was more important. I wasn’t going to lose another battle with Ramon and his friend.

I felt the gun pull away from my body.

Ramon reached for the bag and slid his gun down to the bench between our bodies so it was hidden. “Mr. Costilla is grateful. He hopes that there are no hard feelings.”

I looked at Ramon. “He didn’t kill her, did he?”

Ramon shook his head sadly. “No, he did not, Mr. Braddock. He told you that. I can see why you wouldn’t believe him. But he didn’t.” He nodded at me. “Good-bye.” He tucked the bag under his arm, and he and the other guy disappeared out the door.

I sat there, my mind reeling. I heard a ringing in the distance as I stared at Kate’s letter in my hands. I looked at the words, not reading them, but wondering how things had gotten so bad for her.

The ringing intensified, and I looked up from the letter, irritated that some idiot didn’t realize his cell phone was ringing.

Then I realized I was the idiot.

I stuck the letter in my pocket and pulled out the phone. “Yeah?”

“We’ve gotta talk,” Randall Tower said.

I stood up, gripping the phone tighter. “Fucking right we do.”

“I need to talk to you,” he said, and I realized he was drunk.

“Where are you?” I asked, heading for the door. “Because I’m coming.”

“Meet me at the gliderport,” he said, his words running together. “We can fly away together.”

I hung up the phone and sprinted to my car.

As I weaved in and out of the evening traffic on I-5, I called Liz on my cell.

“Guess what I found?” I said, when she picked up.

“What?”

I told her about the money and the note.

“Do you have it with you?” she asked.

“The note, yeah. The money, no.”

“Where’s the money? In the locker?”

“No, Ramon has it.”

“Who the hell is Ramon?”

“Costilla’s sidekick.”

“Shit.”

I passed a slow-moving van on the right as I flew past Old Town and Presidio Park. “I know. Nothing I could do, though. But you need to see the note.”

“Yes, I do,” she said. “There’s something else you should know though.”

“What?”

“Charlotte Truman’s dead.”

My chest tightened. “What? How?”

“Not sure. After you talked to her, I called a friend in LAPD and asked him to notify me if her name popped up in anything unusual. He just called. They found her in her hotel room.” She paused. “A witness got a license plate leaving the hotel in a hurry.”

“They run it?”

“Yeah, it was rented out of Lindbergh Field. By Randall Tower.”

It was like I saw the punch coming but didn’t bother ducking. “What a fucking surprise that is.”

“Agreed. Where are you right now?”

“On the five, the La Jolla Parkway exit,” I said, trying to block Charlotte’s face from my mind.

“You going to see Carter?”

“No, I’m going to talk to Randall.”

The line buzzed for a moment, and I knew she wasn’t happy. “This isn’t for you to handle.”

“The fuck it isn’t,” I said. “I just got off the phone with the asshole.”

“What? Why?”

“I don’t know. He called me, said we had to meet. And I agreed.”

“You need to wait for me. Or Wellton,” she said. “He was on his way to Westwood to meet with the LA guys about Truman. I can call him on his cell.”

“Randall called me, Liz,” I said, gripping the steering wheel tighter. “I’m going to see him. And I’m not waiting. Come if you want, I don’t care. But I’m not waiting.”

“Where are you meeting?” she asked, the aggravation clear in her voice.

“He says he’s up at the gliderport.”

“Noah, don’t do anything until one of us gets there. You got it.”

“Bye,” I said and clicked off the phone.

It rang again five seconds later. I figured it was Liz again, but the caller ID on the phone showed a number I didn’t recognize. I punched the button. “Hello?”

“Dude,” Carter said. “I’m starving. Where’s my dinner?”

“Carter, I’m busy right now,” I said, swinging the Blazer over into the far right lane. “I can’t.”

“What’s going on?”

I told him what I’d found, what Liz found, and where I was headed.

“Wait for Liz,” he said. “If you tear him up, there’s gonna be nothing she can do.”

“The letter’s good enough,” I said.

“No, it’s not,” he said. “It doesn’t mean shit. Doesn’t mean he killed her.”

“She was afraid of him, Carter,” I yelled into the phone. “She was hiding the money. Charlotte Truman is dead. Ramon told me again that they didn’t kill Kate. I believe him.”

“You believe Costilla’s thug? Come on. You’re not thinking, Noah.”

I fired the phone at the passenger door. I took the La Jolla Village Drive exit and headed toward the Torrey Pines gliderport to find Randall Tower.

The gliderport lurked just south of the long fairways of the Torrey Pines Golf Course, a giant clearing amidst the thick trees and ultra-modern buildings of the biotech corridor along Torrey Pines Road. It was a magnificent takeoff spot for the crazies who were into hang gliding, a flat clifftop that abruptly disappeared and sent them shooting out over Black’s Beach, three hundred feet above the Pacific.

I turned down the paved road that ended in a cul-de-sac. Access to the dirt road and parking area was chained off, a sign proclaiming the port closed after eight at night. A blue Ford Taurus was parked next to the sign.

I parked the Blazer behind the Taurus and got out. I blinked several times, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. I shivered into the cool wind that whipped up and off the cliff face, listening to the ocean roar in the distance.

I walked around the empty lot and down the narrow dirt road. I squinted into the night and barely made out a faint light up ahead where I knew the steep path down to Black’s began. As I got closer, I heard whistling.

Randall was seated on the dirt landing at the top of the stairs, beneath the signs proclaiming the danger of the cliffs and the unstable path, his back to the ocean. A dim, single bulb light barely illuminated the signs, a whistling Randall, about eight empty beer bottles, and one ominous-looking syringe. His light blue oxford was untucked, the left sleeve rolled up above the elbow, and his khakis were wrinkled and dirty at the knees. He didn’t seem to notice that just three feet to his left, the earth disappeared.

He was holding a bottle of Grey Goose in his hand, and he lifted it toward me as a greeting. “Hey, Mister Super Private Detective is here. Woohoo.”