James Grippando - A King's ransom

I turned away from the grisly sight. As I rose, out of the corner of my eye I saw Alex stagger and fall to the ground.

“Alex!”

She didn’t answer. I ran to her, weaving between monuments, jumping over the last one to find her lying on her side between two gravestones. She was shivering as I rolled her onto her back. Blood had soaked through her sweater at the rib cage, just below the heart. Joaquin’s last shot had hit its mark.

“My God, you need an ambulance.”

“Don’t bother. Nobody survives this. I got what I deserved.”

I just shook my head. “So it’s true? You killed Jaime.”

“I never thought it would get this crazy.”

“Damn you. I trusted you. I believed in you.”

A trickle of blood oozed from the corner of her mouth, her voice barely a whisper. “Funny, I thought they’d hold some rich guy for a week or two, get the insurance money, and let him go. That was the deal. Get Joaquin a nice chunk of money, and he’d leave me and my family alone forever.”

“I can’t believe you’d do that.”

“Live in fear for fifteen years. You’d be surprised at what you’ll do.”

“I’d never sell out another human being.”

She grimaced from the pain and took my hand. I pulled back, but she squeezed harder and wouldn’t let me go. “Please don’t hate me.”

I was trembling, still shocked. “I just wish this weren’t true.”

“Then let’s just leave it that I was. . a friend.”

She looked at me and tried to smile, the life draining from those dark, mysterious eyes. She started to say something more, but it passed. Her body went limp in my arms. I held her for a moment, my emotions running the gamut. I lowered her head to the ground, then looked up and saw my father standing over us.

“Was she a friend of yours?” he asked sadly.

The question made me think back to the anonymous note that had led me to Jaime’s door, the way it had been signed, and the way Alex had just used the same words to say good-bye.

“In a weird way, yes. I guess she was ‘A Friend.’ ”

I rose and embraced my father so tightly that our bodies shook. He was sobbing cathartically into my shoulder as I opened my eyes for one last look at Alex, her beautiful face, the sad expression, the troubled life. If she hadn’t told me herself, I would never have believed a word of it.

From her lips it all made perfect, horrible sense.

“Let’s go home,” my father whispered.

“Yes,” I said with a lump in my throat. “Let’s.”

There were no empty seats at our Thanksgiving dinner table. Lindsey, my sister, was home for the first time in two years. Grandma was with us, doing as well as could be expected. My mother was smiling again, finally exuding the fabled glow that kicked in around the fifth month of pregnancy. In less than two weeks Dad was already looking better and slowly gaining some needed weight. The mountain of mashed potatoes and dressing on his plate would surely help the cause.

“Do we have any sushi?” asked Lindsey.

“It’s Thanksgiving, dear,” my mother said reprovingly.

She rolled her eyes and put a sliver of turkey on her plate. I just smiled to myself. For all the family had been through, thankfully we hadn’t changed completely.

Naturally, some things would never be the same. My days at Cool Cash were over. That was just as well, since the Miami office surely wouldn’t survive the firestorm anyway. Before his murder, Jaime Ochoa had given a sealed letter to his mother with instructions to hand it over to the state’s attorney if anything untoward should happen to him. It spelled out the entire scheme. Maggie Johans was named prominently in the cover-up, and she’d spent the last two weeks trying to save her own criminal skin by insisting that she’d acted on the advice of Duncan Fitz. From what I’d read in the newspapers, it wouldn’t be long before they both came crashing down, taking a huge chunk of the firm’s pristine reputation with them.

The saddest part of Jaime’s letter was what he’d written about Alex, detailing the way she’d linked his stolen information about the insurance policy to the kidnappers who capitalized on it. I imagined she’d regretted it from the beginning, which was why she’d stayed on to help negotiate Joaquin down even after the insurance company had fired her and denied my father’s claim. A bigger part of me, however, felt only anger, betrayal-and increasing confusion over that speech she’d delivered before dying. I wondered if she’d really believed that serving up an American would buy her own family a lifetime of safety from Joaquin and his band of killers. Or had she made the whole thing up, one last deception? The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that even if her motive hadn’t been greed, perhaps she and Jaime both had gotten what they’d deserved. My sense that justice had been done only intensified when I learned that a certain Japanese couple, Nisho and her husband, were also K amp;R policyholders with Quality Insurance Company. Fortunately, the scam was uncovered before any other names were sold to kidnappers. From what my father had told me, I was certain that when Nisho was finally released, it would take a lot more than a million and a half dollars to settle her claims against Quality Insurance.

As for my own legal woes, Jaime’s letter was a godsend. His own written words had taken me off the list of murder suspects, as did the forensic evidence. Before its throat was slit, Jaime’s dog had clawed the skin of the real murderer, and the DNA test of the scrapings from under the nails didn’t match me. They matched Alex. That, plus the sworn affidavit of the Colombian priest who had overheard Alex’s confession, pretty much guaranteed that my next role would be not as a defendant in a murder trial but as a grand jury witness in the imminent criminal prosecution against Quality Insurance Company and the lawyers who’d orchestrated the cover-up. It was one more thing to be thankful for on this holiday.

“Everything’s delicious, honey,” my father said.

“Best ever,” I added.

My father smiled at me as he reached for another slice of my mother’s famous cornbread. “Nick, I was thinking about taking the Bertram out tomorrow. Sailfish are running. It’s catch and release, pure sport.”

“Who’s going?”

“Just me, so far. I was hoping you might want to come along.”

It might have been a small thing in other families, but with our past this was huge. “I’d like that a lot.”

“Good. Set your alarm for four-fifteen.”

I coughed on my ice water. Lindsey snickered and said, “Be careful what you wish for.”

The phone rang, and my mother dropped the gravy ladle. The kidnapping was over, but some of the reflexes remained. The ringing continued, two, three times. With my mother’s reaction, no one moved. It was strangely cathartic, allowing the phone to beckon until it stopped, no compelling need to answer it.

Dad broke the silence. “This seems like a good opportunity to settle some family business. Your mother and I have been talking about what to do with the money.”

He meant the million and a half, of course. Though technically it was supposed to have been used for payment of his ransom, it was ours now, the proceeds of my lump-sum settlement with Quality Insurance. My father could do with it as he wished.

“After Nick gets back his out-of-pocket losses, I want to buy out Guillermo and take over the business myself. The way the company’s been losing money, it shouldn’t take much. I’m sure I can turn it around with him out of my hair.”

I nodded. Even though the drug allegations appeared to have been manufactured by Guillermo’s ex-wife, Dad was still better off without him. “You’d do well to distance yourself from him anyway,” I said.