Jennifer Estep - By a Thread

“No worries,” I said in a bright tone, plucking Finn’s keys off the board. “We’ve got it. We’re in a bit of a hurry, so just tell me where the garage is.”

The valet started to protest, but the hundred bucks I slipped him was more than enough for him to jerk his thumb over his shoulder. He’d already gone back to his half doze before we’d rounded the side of the building. The dark opening of the garage waited up ahead.

“Careful now,” I told Bria in a low voice. “Let me go first. Dekes might still have a guy or two down here, waiting in a car to drive Pete and the others back to whatever hole they crawled out of.”

Bria nodded, leaving the luggage cart at the entrance, and I stepped in front of her. Together, we eased into the parking garage. All around me, the concrete let out low, uneasy mutters. Even here at an upscale hotel, the stone resonated with sharp notes of fear, worry, and paranoia. Not surprising. Most people didn’t like parking garages, since they were great places to get mugged—or dead.

But no one was lurking behind the thick concrete posts or in the midnight shadows that filled in the spaces between the rows of luxury cars. That didn’t mean we didn’t run into trouble, though.

Because Finn’s convertible was a mess.

The windshield had been hit in at least three places with a baseball bat or tire iron, and deep, jagged cracks crisscrossed the glass like the thick, silvery threads of a spider’s web. The side mirrors had been knocked off, the radio had been busted, and the leather seats had been ripped to ribbons. Dents covered the car’s hood, while scrapes sliced down the sides where someone had used his key on the slick silver paint.

Looked like someone had told Pete what car we were driving, and the four dead men had decided to bust it up for fun before they came up to the suite and did the same to us.

Bria let out a low whistle. “Finn is going to freak when he sees this.”

Freak was an understatement. I could already hear Finn bitching about how he’d lent us his brand-new baby, and we’d gotten it busted up in less than twenty-four hours. Although that was something of a record, even for me.

“Well,” I said. “At least they didn’t slash the tires too. Let’s go.”

I retrieved the cart and threw our luggage in the backseat before shoving the now-empty cart over into one corner of the garage. Then I helped Bria brush the broken bits of glass, metal, and plastic out of the front seats as best we could. Five minutes later, Bria drove the convertible through the open iron gate at the edge of the hotel grounds and stopped just outside it.

“Where to?” she asked.

“The Sea Breeze.”

Bria looked at me, her eyes full of worry. “You think that Dekes sent some men there too?”

“Probably not, given what I heard Pete say outside the room about going after Callie tomorrow, but there’s only one way to be sure.”

Bria put her foot down on the gas, and we left the Blue Sands hotel behind, with even more trouble probably waiting on the road in front of us.

Bria steered the convertible toward Callie’s restaurant. We were the only car on the road, and only the steady whoosh-whoosh-whoosh of the tires on the pavement broke the silence. The night was dark and eerily quiet. Trees crowded up to the very edge of the narrow, two-lane road and then arched and twisted over it, blocking out everything but a small strip of stars overhead. Thin black tendrils of weeping willows waved back and forth like skeleton fingers in the constant breeze, while the swamp grass and cattails undulated in perfect time below next to the rippling surface of the water. Every once in a while, the convertible’s cracked headlights would catch an animal hiding in the marshes on either side of the road, and its eyes would flash like fiery rubies before we zoomed past.

It seemed to take forever, but it was only a few minutes later when we pulled into the sandy lot that fronted the Sea Breeze. The weathered structure was dark inside and locked up tight for the night, although a lone streetlight burned at the edge of the road. Mosquitoes and other bugs buzzed around the harsh glare, their moving mass of bodies throwing twisted shadows across the landscape.

“Looks like Dekes and his men decided to leave the restaurant alone—at least for tonight,” Bria said.

“Or maybe they just went straight to the source,” I replied. “Where’s Callie’s house? Does she live alone?”

“No, she’s not alone. She’s already moved in with Donovan. Callie said that she didn’t want to try to move and plan a wedding at the same time.” Bria paused. “They’re getting married this summer.”

My heart twinged with old, familiar, bitter hurts, but I kept my face smooth. “Good. She’ll be safe enough with Donovan tonight, but we’ll drive by there anyway and make sure. Dekes probably sent his men after us to show Callie exactly what would happen to her if she doesn’t sell out to him. Bodies tend to motivate people far more than threats do. Maybe he thought she needed some more encouragement besides Stu Alexander. We’ll come back out to the restaurant tomorrow and talk to Callie about what to do next, about how we can stop Dekes for good.”

Bria shook her head. “What you really mean is that you’re going to pump Callie for information about how you can get close enough to Dekes to kill him. I don’t know why it surprises me anymore, but it still does.”

I stared at her. “Dekes sent his men to rape and murder us tonight, just because we dared to stand up to his goons. That’s plenty enough reason for me to kill him, but what makes you think that he won’t do the same to Callie? Or worse? His men certainly wanted to have a go at her. We’re just minor annoyances, tourists passing through who were tougher than they looked. Callie is the one that Dekes really needs to get rid of in order to build his seaside casino. People are more vicious about money than any other thing, and it sounds like the vamp has already sunk quite a bit of dough into his project. He’s not going to let one woman stand in the way of it, no matter what he has to do or how ugly things get. If Dekes is the kind of man that I think he is, then he likes ugly—revels in it, even, like a hog in slop.”

Bria didn’t like it, but she couldn’t argue with my logic. My sister might not be as far gone into the shady side of life as I was, but she’d seen her share of bad things as a cop, and she’d dealt with a lot of scumbags, especially since coming back to Ashland.

“Fine,” she muttered. “We’ll come out here for brunch in the morning and talk to Callie like I planned. But that’s hours away. So what do you want to do after we check on Callie’s house? If you’re right, Dekes can track us to any hotel that we might stay at here on the island, and I don’t think you want to ask Donovan if you can sleep on his couch.”

“One step ahead of you, baby sister. One step ahead.” I pulled my cell phone out of my jeans pocket and scrolled through the screens until I found what I was looking for. “Do you know where 213 Mockingbird Drive is?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Because that’s where we’re going to stay tonight,” I said. “I took the precaution of renting a beach house under another name just in case we ran into trouble down here.”

Bria shook her head. “You can’t do anything like a normal person, can you? Not even relax enough to go on vacation for one measly weekend.”

The cold reproach in her voice made me shift in my seat. “I like to be prepared. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

Bria snorted, but she made a U-turn in the parking lot and headed back the way we’d come. Callie had given my sister Donovan’s address before we’d left the Sea Breeze earlier tonight, and we pulled up to the detective’s house a few minutes later.