Janet Evanovich - Takedown Twenty

“You stole that Brahmin, didn’t you? You went back to Randy Berger’s garage and lifted a handbag.”

“I didn’t steal it,” Lula said. “I rescued it. It was being held hostage there.”

The giraffe truck slowly rolled down the street, and when it turned the corner we could see Kevin looking out at us. With its twenty-foot-high canvas roof, the truck looked like a horse trailer on steroids. Everyone waved at Kevin, and he disappeared from view, on his way to the Naples Zoo.

Lula and I returned to Ranger’s loaner SUV, and just for the heck of it I drove past the basketball court. It was almost two o’clock and the court was deserted except for a lone figure sitting on a bench, looking into the court through the chain link fence. It was Antwan. He still had the big white bandage on his ear, and now he had an additional bandage on his foot. Crutches rested against the bench.

“I bet Shaneeka shot him in the foot,” Lula said.

I idled on the side of the road, and we watched Antwan for a couple minutes.

“He looks depressed,” Lula said. “You think we should go cheer him up?”

“We’re supposed to be trying to arrest him.”

“Yeah, but that was back when you were a bounty hunter. Of course, if you wanted to be a bounty hunter again then we could slap some cuffs on him. We don’t have to worry about him running away from us. And we don’t have to worry about him hearing us creep up on him. And he probably don’t even have a gun, since I still have his gun.”

“Kind of takes all the fun out of it,” I said.

Lula nodded. “I see what you’re saying.”

We watched him for another minute.

“Oh hell,” I said. “Let’s take him down.”

“Freakin’ A!” Lula said. “My girl’s back in the saddle.”

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KATE O’HARE’S FAVORITE outfit was her blue windbreaker with the letters FBI written in yellow on the back, worn over a basic black T-shirt and matching black Kevlar vest. The ensemble went well with everything, particularly when paired with jeans and accessorized with a Glock. Thirty-three-year-old Special Agent O’Hare didn’t like feeling exposed and unarmed, especially on the job. That all but ruled her out for undercover work. Fine by her. She preferred a hard-charging style of law enforcement, which was exactly what she was practicing on that 96 degree winter afternoon in Las Vegas when she marched into the St. Cosmas Medical Center in her favorite outfit with a dozen similarly dressed agents behind her.

While the other agents fanned out to seal every exit in the building, Kate pushed past the security guards in the lobby and made her way like a guided missile to the first-floor office of Rufus Stott, the chief administrator of the hospital. She blew past Stott’s stunned assistant without even acknowledging her existence and burst into Stott’s office. The startled Stott yelped and nearly toppled out of his chrome-and-mesh ergonomic chair. He was a chubby, bottom-heavy little guy who looked like a turnip that some bored wizard had tapped with a magic wand and turned into a fifty-five-year-old bureaucrat. He had a spray tan, tortoiseshell glasses, and crotch wrinkles in his tan slacks. His hand was over his heart, and he was gasping for air.

“Don’t shoot,” he finally managed.

“I’m not going to shoot,” Kate said. “I don’t even have my gun drawn. Do you need water, or something? Are you okay?”

“No, I’m not okay,” Stott said. “You just scared the bejeezus out of me. Who are you? What do you want?”

“I’m Special Agent Kate O’Hare, FBI.” She slapped a piece of paper down on his desk. “This is a warrant giving us full access to your concierge wing.”

“We don’t have a concierge wing,” Stott said.

Kate leaned in close, locking her intense blue eyes on him. “Six obscenely wealthy and desperate patients flew in today from all over the country. They were picked up from McCarran airport by limos and brought here. Upon arrival at your private concierge wing, they each wired one million dollars to St. Cosmas’s offshore bank account and immediately jumped to the top of an organ waiting list.”

“You can’t be serious,” Stott said. “We don’t have any offshore bank accounts and we certainly can’t afford to rent limos. We’re teetering on bankruptcy.”

“That’s why you’re conducting off-the-books transplant surgeries using illegally acquired organs that you bought on the black market. We know those patients are here and being prepped for surgery right now. We will lock this building down and search every single room and broom closet if we have to.”

“Be my guest,” Stott said, and handed the warrant back to her. “We aren’t doing any transplant surgeries, and we don’t have a concierge wing. We don’t even have a gift shop.”

Stott no longer looked scared, and he didn’t look like he was lying. Not good signs, Kate thought. He should be in a cold sweat by now. He should be phoning his lawyer.

Eighteen hours earlier, Kate had been at her desk in L.A., tracking scattered intel on known associates of a wanted felon, when she’d stumbled on chatter about a certain financially strapped Las Vegas hospital offering organ transplants to the highest bidder. She dug deeper and discovered that the patients were already en route to Vegas for their surgeries, so she dropped everything and organized a rush operation.

“Take a look at this,” she said, showing Stott a photo on her iPhone.

It was a medium close-up of a man about her age wearing a loose-fitting polo shirt, soft and faded from years of use. His brown hair was windblown. His face was alight with a boyish grin that brought out the laugh lines at the corners of his brown eyes.

“Do you know this man?” she asked.

“Sure I do,” Stott replied. “That’s Cliff Clavin, the engineer handling the asbestos removal from our old building.”

Kate felt a dull ache in her stomach, and it wasn’t from the Jack in the Box sausage-and-egg sandwich she’d had for breakfast. Her gut, flat and toned despite her terrible eating habits, was where her anxieties and her instincts resided and liked to communicate with her in a language of cramps, pains, queasiness, and general malaise.

“Cliff Clavin is a character on the television show Cheers ,” she said.

“Yeah, crazy coincidence, right?”

“What old building?” she asked him.

He turned to the window and pointed at a five-story building on the other side of the parking lot. “That one.”

The building was an architectural artifact from the swinging ’60s with its lava rock accents, big tinted windows, and a lobby portico topped with white gravel.

“That was the original hospital,” Stott said. “We moved out of there a year ago. We built this new one to handle the demand for beds that we wrongly anticipated would come from …”

Kate wasn’t listening. She was already running out the door. The instant she saw the other building, she knew exactly how she and those six wealthy patients had been duped. The man in the photo on her iPhone wasn’t Cliff Clavin, and he wasn’t an engineer. He was Nicolas Fox, the man she’d been pursuing when she’d stumbled on the organ transplant scheme.