Chapter Ten
TEN
“Charlie Cardello,” Ginny said, pulling the passenger’s shade down to shield her eyes—the morning light reflected off the still ocean on the other side of the parking lot right into their faces—“was the owner of Cardello Industries, the largest distributor of ketamine in the Eastern States. He also owned a number of other businesses that were definitely not mob-related in any way.”
“Gotcha.”
She took the plastic lid off her paper cup to blow on the steaming coffee. “They were completely legal businesses.”
“Right. I heard you the first time. Why did your family represent him?”
She rolled her eyes. “He was sued by this old guy who said Charlie bought his family company out from under him, but all it took was a financial audit to prove that Charlie had purchased the shares and equipment all legally and above board. It was just sellers’ remorse.”
Shepherd crinkled the empty burrito wrapper in his hand and tossed it in the backseat. “You call a lot of mob bosses by their first name?”
“Only the handsome ones,” she said, before she stuck her tongue out at him. His attention zeroed in on it before he shook himself. It was just a tongue, and it was just a mob boss, and neither of those things was important. Not really.
Mr. Martin was dead, and Shepherd had stepped in his blood. That was important.
“Anyway, I don’t know why he’d go after my mother. She wasn’t a part of his case at all—and it worked out in his favor.”
Her phone buzzed. The home screen had at least ten unread messages from people labeled Dad and Vincent and Grandpa. Ginny clicked that tongue of hers and powered off the phone.
Shepherd pressed a button on his navigation display to turn on the maps, finger poised to type in her address. “You ready for me to take you home?”
She shook her head. “I need to talk to Charlie first.”
“But the cops said Charlie was dead?”
Ginny pushed his hand out of the way and typed out the address of a home not too far from where they were. “As a general rule of thumb,” she said, “I try not to take whatever cops say seriously.”
The nav system told him to turn right onto the road, but it might as well have been speaking Japanese for all the sense it was making.
“You are out of your mind. I’m not taking you to some gangster’s house!
Especially a Schrodinger’s Cat Gangster who also, if alive, is behind the death of Mr. Martin and your mother’s kidnapping. ”
“No way.” Ginny scoffed. “He wouldn’t have kidnapped my mom. But I bet he knows something about it. He knows who took her or why. I have to talk to him.”
“Why would Mr. Martin’s last word be ‘Cardello’ if it was only a helpful clue and not a deathbed accusation?”
“I don’t know, Shepherd! Why would a man’s last word be ‘rosebud’?”
His mouth hung open in complete and utter uncertainty of what the hell she was talking about, much less how to reply. “Is that a riddle? Some sort of ‘What have I got in my pocket?’ moment?”
She stared at him with his dumbfounded expression mirrored on her pretty face. “Citizen Kane?”
His brain short-circuited. His first impulse was to state, for the record, that his name was Preston Shepherd. That felt incorrect, so he swallowed it down and said instead, “What the hell?”
“Fine!” She threw the passenger door open. “You do whatever it is you do at the restaurant all day! I’ll call an Uber and go talk to Charlie myself!”
As she went to unfasten the seatbelt, he held on to her wrist. “Wait a minute. Wait a minute! If you think I’m going to let you—”
“Let me?”
“—go to some gangster’s house alone, you are thoroughly mistaken.”
She glared at him. He glared back. Neither of them blinked for several long, dry heartbeats. Finally, her bottom lip quivered ever so slightly, and he caved. “I will take you to Cardello’s house,” he conceded.
Ginny gasped in delight. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed his cheek.
He ignored the pleasant warmth that lingered on his skin.
“But I am doing so angrily and grumpily, and the instant I think it looks fishy, we are leaving. I don’t care if I have to hogtie you to the roof. When I say it’s time to leave, it’s time to leave. Do we understand each other?”
She pressed one more kiss to his face, this time near his mouth. She lingered for a moment too long before pulling back far enough to whisper, “Perfectly.”
The house that the GPS brought them to—at about the halfway point between Laguna Key and South Miami—was a secluded ranch-style house, surrounded by tall, spindly pine trees.
Even in the light, the trees looked ominous, the bottom half of their trunks charred.
Every couple of years, firefighters did a controlled burn, and Shepherd always noticed the gray palm trees.
But he never really got close enough to the pines in his day-to-day life to see the remnants of fire left behind.
This was the kind of habitat you expected a Florida panther to be hiding in, and he didn’t mean a hockey player.
The road to the house wasn’t even paved, but it was graveled right up to the front door. He brought the car to a complete stop at the end of the driveway, unwilling to go any further. “I don’t know about this, Ginny. This is the kind of house you see in a horror movie.”
“This is a very nice house!” Ginny protested, already reaching for her buckle.
“I didn’t say it wasn’t nice. I said it was horror-movie-worthy.”
“Do you know how much money it costs to get approved to build in the Rockland Pines?”
Shepherd shook his head. “I didn’t say it was cheap. I said it was horrific.”
She tossed her hair over her shoulder. “I’m going to knock on the door.”
Shepherd shook his head harder.
“Come on, Shepherd. Don’t freak out. It doesn’t even look like anyone’s home. OK? I’m just going to knock on the door and then we can leave.”
He sighed, but his stomach heaved. What he wanted to do was stick his head out of the car, vomit, and then drive Ginny to her parents’ house. Maybe pick up a ginger ale and some antacids. But what he did instead was burp and nod.
Ginny smiled at him. And it was very stupid—maybe he was just an idiot—how much her smile calmed his indigestion. He shouldn’t have eaten that burrito as fast as he did.
She left the car, slamming the door behind her, and walked down the gravel driveway as if she didn’t have a care in the world. Like she was here for a coffee date or maybe even to sell some encyclopedias.
Did people still sell encyclopedias door to door? That was a thing when he was a kid. People still needed encyclopedias, didn’t they? Like, the internet couldn’t know everything. Or if it did, it knew too much, and then how could you tell what was real knowing and what was made up?
He burped again.
Ginny knocked on the door. Shepherd gripped the steering wheel. She knocked on the door again. He moved his hand to the gearshift to take the car out of park. She looked at him, shrugged, and held up a finger.
Shepherd shook his head. “Don’t do it,” he said. “Don’t you dare do it.”
But she mouthed, “One sec!” before traipsing around to the back of the house, disappearing from view.
He tapped his foot against the floor. His shaking made the whole car sway. Shepherd forced himself to stop. She said she’d be right back. She was just going to knock on the back door, like some kind of … encyclopedia saleswoman. And then no one would answer, and they could leave.
They would leave.
They would leave any second now.
But the seconds ticked by and turned into minutes. Cicadas angry at the world screamed all around him. A lizard jumped on the hood of his car and ran up to the roof.
There was no sign of Ginny.
“Damn it.” He took the keys out of the ignition. “She probably got eaten by a panther or something. Just pull it together.” He got out of the car and retrieved a baseball bat from the backseat.
There wasn’t much a baseball bat could do against a panther, but a man’s gotta use the tools he’s been given.
“Don’t freak out, Shepherd,” he muttered under his breath, gravel crunching beneath his shoes.
“This house is too expensive to be haunted.” He scoffed.
“Now I gotta go and fight a wild animal or a ghost with a baseball bat. And for what? Stupid fake girlfriend, that’s what.
So what if she’s pretty and she smells good? ”
There was no sign of Ginny around the back of the house. No sign of panther paws, no ectoplasm. He circled the entire house before realization swept over him, bringing ice-cold dread with it.
She’d snuck in the damn house.