Deception (Southern Comfort) (36 page)

“I’ll be fine,” she assured him, covering his hand with her own.  “I have reading material, mind-altering drugs, and Simms.  What more could a girl ask for?”

Josh frowned at that last part, sending Simms an assessing look over his shoulder. Sam felt a laugh tickling her throat instead of tears.  Simms was pudgy and balding, not to mention married and a father, but even if he’d been a cross between a movie star and a Chippendale dancer he wouldn’t hold a candle to Josh. 

For Sam, Josh was The One. Always had been. Always would be. 

“I love you,” she said, nudging his chin back toward her.  “Don’t worry.  Just go do what you need to do.”

Josh sobered instantly and looked at her.  “If anyone calls or comes to the door while I’m gone, I want you to let Simms handle it.  Until we figure out what’s going on and who’s involved, I’m going to step all over our usual boundaries and insist on keeping you in lockdown.”

His expression was hard, lips thinned in determination, but it was the fear in his eyes that got to Sam.  She had no desire to put herself in harm’s way, for both their sakes, and she’d gladly give up autonomy to avoid it. 

“I’ll be good,” she promised, crossing her heart to show she meant it.

“You’re always good, sweetheart,” he said, bestowing a final kiss upon her lips as he stood up.  “Just be safe.”

After a few terse words with Simms, Josh winked at her and left.

The next few hours passed in relative comfort.  Simms was good company, showing off photos of his young daughter and telling Sam every bit of dirt he knew about Josh, and when her various aches and pains got the better of her she doped herself on pain meds and slept.  She’d been out for a little over an hour when a shrill noise startled her awake.

“What’s that?” she mumbled, leaning up onto an elbow as she fought off heavy slumber.

“I don’t know.”  Simms pulled his sock-covered feet down from the sofa, clicking ESPN off by remote.  He cocked an ear toward the entryway and frowned.  “It sounds like a… fire alarm.”  He stuffed his feet into his shoes without bothering to tie them and headed toward the door.  After peering out into the hall through the fish-eye peephole, he withdrew his service weapon from its holster.  He punched the alarm code into the panel to set the system to standby before easing the door open enough to look out.

Rubbing the grit from her eyes, Sam sat up and pulled the blanket around her.  The loose-knit sweats she was wearing were both comfortable and warm, but the chill of unrelieved tension had settled deep within her marrow.  From out in the hall she could hear murmuring, as well as the muted sounds of doors opening and closing. It was only a moment before Simms popped back in, expression grim.

“There’s a fire on the ground floor of the building,” he told her, snagging her sneakers from their position by the front door before striding purposefully toward her.  “The fire department is evacuating the building.”

“Fire?” Sam asked in slow-dawning horror, thinking of Josh’s beautiful home and everything in it.  Clothing and possessions could be replaced easily enough, but his drawings were one of a kind. If nothing else, she wanted to save the portrait he’d done of her with an intensity that was almost frightening.  “I have to get something from the bedroom.”

Simms frowned and came around the sofa, tying her shoes for her as he knelt.

“We really shouldn’t mess around,” he said sternly, looking up from his crouched position.  “I’m not sure how bad the situation is and I’m not willing to take chances with either of our safety.  I’ve got a wife and kid to go home to and Josh will kill me if anything happens to you.” 

“I won’t leave without it,” Sam said stubbornly, feeling a completely foreign and unexpected rush of tears.  This, on top of everything else she’d been through lately, was somehow more than she could bear.  She pushed Simms’ hands aside and surged to her feet, her aching body protesting the sudden movement.  “I’m sorry,” she managed to say around her tears.  “You go on ahead and I’ll catch up with you.” 

Simms stopped her with a firm hand.

“What is it that you want?” he asked on a sigh, glancing over his shoulder toward the door to the hall. No doubt wondering if he should say the hell with it and leave her, not that she could really blame him. 

“There’s a framed drawing on the wall of the master bedroom.  A pencil sketch.  Of me.”

Simms’ gaze snapped back toward her in disbelief, then he rolled his eyes in the face of her silent weeping.  “Put your shoes on and go wait by the door.  I’ll grab it.”  Muttering something about crazy, sentimental females, Sam watched him hurry off and quickly did as he asked.

Appropriately shod and doing her best to control her emotions, she grabbed her purse from the hall table. Then waited pensively for the sound of his footsteps, difficult to hear over the shrieking alarm.  Finally, he emerged at the bottom of the stairs and came toward her with a wry expression.  “This thing must really mean something to you.” He handed it over for her to deal with so that he had his hands available to reach his weapon.

“You have no idea.”  She took it from him with loving care and held it close as he shepherded her toward the stairwell.

They encountered other residents on their descent, the whole lot of them swarming downward like lemmings. As they cleared the second floor landing, Sam caught the unmistakable scent of fire.  Smoke roiled, spewing like phantom vomit from the mouth of the fire door below them as two turned-out firefighters poured forth.  Sam coughed, the acrid smell stinging her nostrils, burning a path down her already abused throat.  When the men saw Simms, clearly an officer in uniform, they paused to ask his help in controlling the outside crowd.  As with any fire, this one had attracted a gaggle of onlookers whose curiosity sometimes overrode their common sense.

“You got it,” Simms agreed from behind the arm he held against his face to prevent as much smoke inhalation as he could manage.  Then he hustled Sam down the stairs as quickly as safety allowed, following their fellow escapees into the balm of the cool evening.

Sam looked around at the chaos, refugees from the partially engulfed building standing around in varying degrees of both dress and shock.  The curious, pulled from the many restaurants and businesses surrounding the residential structure, stood in casual little knots of morbid interest. 

The flickering glow from the flames illuminated some faces while casting others into shadow, the play of light eerie in the gathering twilight. Sam looked them over with an odd sense of detachment.  Probably a lingering effect of the drugs.  She thanked God for Simms – if she’d been on her own in the apartment there was no guarantee she would have awakened enough to make it out. 

Sam turned to survey the disaster.  The lower level of the structure was obviously sustaining the greatest amount of damage.  Josh’s condo was located in the far left-hand corner of the top floor, currently out of the reach of the flames which the firefighters were battling desperately to contain. Maybe, if they were really lucky,
it would be spared from total ruin.   

She clutched Josh’s artwork to her chest and even the heat from the flames couldn’t penetrate her numbness.  All that was happening just didn’t seem real.

“I should call Josh,” Simms pointed out.

“Okay,” she agreed, tonelessly.  Poor Josh didn’t need any more stress.  But before Simms could pull out his phone, a scuffle erupted in the crowd.  An onlooker had started filming with his cell phone, no doubt hoping to sell his footage to an arriving news crew
or upload it to Youtube, and one of the residents had taken umbrage.  He knocked the phone out of the other man’s hand, causing the first guy to start shoving.  Within moments others had stepped into the fray and things were looking to get out of hand.

“Ah, hell,” Simms muttered.  “Stay right here while I go deal with this.”

Looking pissed off and disgusted, Simms waded into the mess. Sam took the opportunity to set the drawing against a nearby lamppost.  Framed behind glass as it was, it was relatively heavy. She was still too sore to be able to carry it for any length.  Wearily, she sat down beside it, coughing some lingering smoke from her throat.

“Ma’am?”

Sam looked up into the benign face of a fireman who’d stepped from the gathering shadows.  “You look like you could use a hit of this.”  He gestured to the oxygen tank he carried.

“I’m fine,” she said, but her voice betrayed her, emerging as more croak than words.

He smiled and knelt down beside her.  “Just a couple deep breaths and you’ll feel better.” 

“Alright,” she relented, coughing.  She took the apparatus and placed it over her face.  She breathed in and out, looking over the molded plastic to the man hovering above her.  All of his features seemed to blur together.  Maybe the drugs, she thought, woozy.  Maybe she’d inhaled more smoke than she thought. 

And yet even as she sucked oxygen into her lungs, the fireman’s face faded into black.

TONY
Salinas, Josh thought, using the flat of his pencil to define the cheekbones. The composite had been trickier than usual to pull off because of the changes wrought by the fire.  But after laboring over his sketchpad for hours he felt certain they had the right man.   

One piece of the puzzle down. 

Salinas had indeed died in that fire.  But how or if he connected to the man who’d attacked Sam still needed to be fit into place.  He had a feeling there was a bigger picture they were missing, that the two dead men were only part of the whole. But since his objectivity couldn’t be counted on, they weren’t exactly asking his opinion.

He’d just set his pencil down on top of his sketchpad when Kathleen bumped into his desk with her hip.  “Sorry,” she said, placing her palm down to steady herself.  Then she moved on without another word.

Josh frowned after her, finding her reticence odd – Kathleen always had something to say even if it wasn’t particularly pertinent – but a glance back at his desk revealed a folded piece of paper and his brows shot up in surprise.  Apparently, she did have something to say to him but was resorting to smoke signals to do so.  He opened the paper as surreptitiously as possible, intrigued by the brief message:

Let me buy you a cup of coffee

Feeling very junior high, Josh refolded the paper and pocketed it. His pulse kicked into high gear, because he was sure this was about the man who’d attacked Sam.

Ten minutes later he was sliding into a corner booth at Starbu
cks, Kathleen pushing a tall pumpkin latte toward him.  “I take it you didn’t drag me here to ply me with the seasonal special.”

Glum as he’d ever seen her, Kathleen cast her gaze around before answering.  “We got a line on our dead man’s identity.  We thought we came up empty when we ran his prints through AFIS, but I just got off the phone with an Agent Bristol out of the Bureau’s New York field office who wanted to know where I’d come across the prints.  Seems our search sent up a red flag because they coincide with one of their long term investigations. The owner of the prints has been arrested and held a number of times for a whole slew of offenses, but there was never enough evidence to indict him, or witnesses conveniently forgot what they’d seen.”

The pumpkin spice suddenly stuck in Josh’s throat.  “Mafia?” he guessed, feeling nauseous.

“Oh yeah.  The guy’s name was Vincent Santone.  He’s the second or third cousin of a reigning don.”

Josh pushed the nearly full latte away. 

“What I want to know,” Kathleen continued, looking a bit green in the gills herself, “is what the hell was he doing in Donnie Martin’s hospital room?”

“Shit.”  Josh rubbed a hand over his eyes.  “This has to have something to do with the Roadhouse.  They’ve been running some numbers out of the back room, seemed like pretty penny ante stuff, but maybe it was a lot bigger than I thought.” 

Kathleen leaned back, assessed him with a look.  “You might have mentioned that sooner.”

“You’re right.”  He felt like a shit.  “And in all honesty I was planning to.   But I got sidetracked by everything that’s been happening, and Sam was worried about the place getting shut down, losing her brother’s benefits…” his voice trailed off at how pathetic that sounded.  He was a cop, and he should have said something.  He felt the reproach roll off Kathleen in a wave. 

“You think Donnie Martin’s involved?”  

“It makes sense,” he admitted, feeling ill.  “To what degree I couldn’t say.”  He raked a hand through his hair.  “Are the feds coming in on this?”

“They’ll descend like a plague of locusts.”

He thought of telling Sam and his stomach rolled dangerously.  She didn’t need any more to deal with.   But then his mind returned to the puzzle.  “Salinas, the orderly from the hospital, he just moved from New York several months ago.  Got the job after Donnie went in.”

“Watch dog?”  Kathleen wondered.

“Maybe. Though that doesn’t seem like the usual mob tactics.  Why wait all these months to eradicate the problem?”

“Maybe somebody was being cautious.  With Martin in a coma, he didn’t exactly present a threat.  No need to waste the effort if he wouldn’t be talking.”

Josh thought there had to be a little more to it, but what, he couldn’t hazard to guess.  “You realize that if we’re on the right track this puts Tony Salinas’ sudden demise in a whole new light?”