Chapter Nineteen
NINETEEN
When they pulled up to the house at the end of a street in a seemingly regular neighborhood in the Florida Keys, Shepherd parked behind a standard-looking Toyota.
“What if this is another meth den?” he asked, already knowing it wasn’t.
Now that they were parked, there were kids who ran back out into the street playing soccer.
Each prefab house, looking like double-wide trailers on stilts, had canal access.
Some of the yards not only had cars and kids playing soccer but boats and jet skis on trailers.
There were palm trees dotting front yards, coconuts in various shades of brown splattered across gravel driveways.
Not that people, you know, didn’t make meth wherever they could.
But this looked like the kind of neighborhood a hero in a movie would flashback to when remembering their first love or something during a pivotal moment.
“Fortunately, you’ve lost the bat,” Ginny said. She patted his arm. “Don’t freak out, Shepherd. I can handle Charlie. Just stick with me.”
Unable to do anything else without facing the risk of angering her father and his pro bono lawyer, Shepherd got out of the car and followed Ginny up the wooden steps to the front door. There were Christmas lights still strung up around rickety handrails.
Ginny knocked on the door with all the confidence of an FBI agent.
Shepherd hung behind her, hands in his pockets, on the lookout in case one of those kids playing soccer turned out to be another murderer.
Sure, they looked like they were twelve, but honestly being attacked by a preteen would be the least surprising thing that happened to him that day.
Sweat gathered already around his hairline, collecting in the back of his neck.
Shepherd fanned himself with his shirt and glared at the nearest preteen.
“Mr. Cardello?” Ginny called out, knocking again. “Mr. Cardello, I need to talk to you, please!”
“Nobody here by that name!” a male voice shouted back. “And nobody wants to buy anything either!”
Ginny huffed. “We aren’t selling anything! This is important, Mr. Cardello. Please open your door.”
The blinds near the door cracked open, a pair of dark eyes and thick, dark eyebrows visible for half a moment. “No!” he said. “Don’t want no religion, either!”
“We are not religious,” Ginny said. “Come on. They don’t send out co-ed pair groups. You know that; it’s always, like, two dudes.”
“One time, I had two ladies,” Shepherd offered. He spoke up for the bent blind’s benefit. “They were Jehovah’s Witnesses! I’m just a pizza guy!”
There was an almost audible hesitation, like the silence itself was a loud noise. “You have pizza?”
“No,” Shepherd said. “I make pizza.”
“No, you don’t,” Ginny said.
Shepherd shook a hand from side to side. “I employ people who make pizza. OK? I’m not trying to sell you anything. We’re not trying to sell you anything. Ginny just wants to talk to you.”
“Ginny who?”
“Virginia Kent.” Ginny reached into her purse and pulled out her wallet. She held up her driver’s license to the blinds closest to the door. “My family represented you in court a little over a year ago.”
There were footsteps inside, like the man was pacing back and forth. Through the crack in the door, he said, “Cardello ain’t here, lady. Don’t need no process servers hanging around, either!”
“I’m not a process server, Mr. Cardello. I’m not even a lawyer anymore. I lost my job.”
There was another loud silence, broken only by a lock being turned. Slowly, on creaking hinges, the front door cracked open. A disheveled and dirty man in a bathrobe eyed them from inside. With a sniff, he asked, “You too, huh?”