Hostage At Crystal Manor Read online

  They’d owed Dillinger; he’d been holding something over them. Now all they wanted was to get away as quickly as possible, get to a graveyard and dig something up.

  What hold could Dillinger have had on the men?

  It didn’t matter at the moment. What mattered was the fact that one man was dead and Capone couldn’t move an inch on his own.

  “My leg is broken!” Capone shouted up to Dillinger. “I’m in bad shape. I tripped, fell, Nelson went running off…”

  Dillinger started swearing. “We’ve got to get you up here.” He paced the deck, grabbing his head, swearing. “Floyd! Floyd, get up here, help!”

  Floyd appeared on deck, looking around anxiously. He saw Capone. “Hey, you’re alive!”

  “Well, somewhat,” Capone said.

  It wasn’t easy, but with help from Floyd and Vince, they got Capone onto the boat.

  Nick crawled over the hull.

  By then, Kody and Brandi had pillows and sheets taken from the boat’s cabin stretched out and ready on the deck. In a few minutes, they had Capone comfortably situated. Vince had noted a broken plank caught up in a nearby mangrove. He hurried to get it and, between them all, they splinted Capone’s leg.

  “He needs medical care,” Kody said.

  “He can’t go slogging through the Everglades, up on the hammocks, through the saw grass and the wetlands,” Nick agreed quietly.

  “I’ll make it! I’ll make whatever!” Capone said. “Don’t…don’t…”

  “He thinks you’re going to kill him,” Vince told Dillinger.

  “What?” Dillinger asked. He truly looked surprised.

  “I’m like a lame horse,” Capone said quietly.

  Kody had been kneeling on the deck by him. She stood, retreated down the steps for a minute, and came back with a bottle of vodka.

  “This will help,” she said.

  “I killed Nelson for leaving you, because we don’t turn on each other,” Dillinger said. He looked at his friend and reassured him.

  “Then you have to leave me,” Capone said, looking at Dillinger and taking a long swig of the vodka. He sighed softly, easing back as the alcohol eased some of his pain. “I swear there’s nothing I will tell them. There’s nothing I can tell them. I don’t even know where you’re going. Just leave me.”

  “You’ll do time. You know you’ll do time,” Dillinger told him.

  “Yes, yes, I will. But I may live long enough to get out,” he said. “If I try to go with you…”

  Dillinger thought about his words. He lowered his head. After a long moment he nodded.

  He walked over to the big man on the ground, leaned down and embraced him.

  Then he jerked up, his gun trained on the others.

  “He stays. We go,” he said.

  Nick was startled when Kody spoke up. “You can’t leave him, not like this.”

  “Miss Cameron,” Nick said, trying to step in, trying to stop whatever bad things her words might do to Dillinger’s mind.

  “He needs help. Look,” Kody said, determined. “Brandi is screaming and scared and freaking us all out. She needs to be picked up as soon as possible. And Capone here needs help. Leave the two of them. Capone still has his gun, and Brandi isn’t a cruel person. They have enough supplies on the boat to get them through the night okay. I say we leave them both.” She turned to Dillinger. “That leaves five of us. Five of us in good health and good shape and not prone to hysterics in any way. We can make it.”

  Dillinger stared back at her. Nick barely dared to breathe.

  Dillinger smiled. “You are quite something, Miss Cameron. I think you might have something. All right! Get supplies together. We leave Capone and little Miss Cry Baby here. Actually, Blondie, you really were starting to get on my nerves. Let’s do it.”

  “You want to move deep into the Everglades by night?” Vince asked Dillinger.

  “Well, hell, yes, of course!” Dillinger said. “The cops or someone will be around here very soon. We’ve got to get deep into the swamp and the muck and the hell of it all before the law comes around. Darkness, my boy! Yes, great. Into the abyss! Indeed, into the abyss!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  The airboat was a flat-bottomed, aluminum-and-fiberglass craft with the engine and propeller held in a giant metal cage at the rear. Dillinger prodded everyone in.

  Kody recalled the two men who had come to deliver the boat. They hadn’t looked like bad men.

  Once again she asked herself, So what did bad men look like?

  Why didn’t Barrow look like a bad man? Was he a good man—somehow under the influence of real criminals because he was between a rock and a hard place? He had a child somewhere being held, perhaps. Somehow, he was being coerced…either that, or she was simply being really drawn to someone really, really bad—and she couldn’t accept that!

  She had a hard time understanding what was going on with any of the men. She wished she could close her eyes and open them to find out that everything that had happened had occurred in her imagination.

  But it was real. Too real.

  At least she was grateful that Dillinger had listened to her and left both Capone and Brandi behind.

  Alive.

  As she was. For now…

  Amid the deafening sounds of the motors she looked out into the night.

  It was dark. Darker than any darkness Kody had ever known before. There was a haze before her to the north, and she knew the haze she saw was the light that illuminated the city of Miami and beyond up the coast.

  But it was far away.

  Out here Kody had no concept of time. She realized suddenly that she was tired, exhausted. It had to be getting close to the middle of the night. It seemed they’d been moving forever, but, of course, out here, that didn’t mean much. Unless you were a ranger or a native of the area, each canal, new hammock and twist and zig or zag of the waterways seemed the same. The glow of gator eyes—caught by the headlights of the airboat—was truly chilling.

  And despite it all, she’d nearly drifted to sleep twice. Vince had caught her both times.

  Suddenly the whirr of the airboat stopped. She jerked awake—as did Vince at her side.

  “Where are we?” Vince murmured.

  Kody didn’t know. But as she blinked in the darkness, Barrow and Floyd jumped out of the airboat and caught hold of the hull, pulling it—with the others still aboard—up on a hammock of higher, dry land. The lights still shone for a moment, long enough for Kody to see there was a chickee hut before them. It was the kind of abode the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes of Florida had learned to use years before—built up off the ground, open to allow for any breeze, and covered with the palms and fronds that were so abundant.

  She was still staring blankly at the chickee hut when she realized Barrow had come back to the airboat—and that he had a hand out to assist her from her chair.

  She was so tired that she didn’t think; she accepted his hand. And she was so tired that she slipped coming off the airboat.

  He swept her up quickly. Instinctively she wound her arms around his neck.

  It felt right; it felt good to hold on to him…

  She wanted to cry out and pull away. And she didn’t know why she felt with such certainty that he would protect her and that he’d keep her from harm.

  He set her down on dry ground. “Hop on up. I’m going to light a fire,” he said, indicating the chickee hut.

  It was just a few feet off the ground. Vince was already there. He offered her an assist up and she took it.

  There was nothing in the little hut—nothing at all. But it was dry and safe, Kody thought. Floyd was up on the platform with them and he indicated that the two of them should sit. “Make yourselves as comfortable as you can. Grab what sleep you
can. This isn’t exactly the Waldorf but…”

  Kody took a seat in the rear of the chickee hut and Vince followed her. She could hear Dillinger and Barrow talking, but they kept their argument low and nothing of it could be heard.

  Vince shook his head. “What the hell?” he murmured.

  Kody reached for his hand and squeezed it. “Hey. We’re going to be okay.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Just follow directions and you’ll be okay,” Floyd said.

  They were both silent. Then Vince spoke, as if he just had to have something to fill the silence of the night.

  “Did you know that Alexander Graham Bell led the team that created the first airboat?” Vince asked idly as they sat there. “And it was up in Nova Scotia? The thing was called the Ugly Duckling. Cool, huh? The things are useful down here—and on ice for rescues. Go figure.”

  “Sure, cool,” Kody agreed. “I had not known that,” she said lightly.

  “Alexander Graham Bell, huh, go figure!” Floyd said.

  Kody thought Floyd was just as interested in what the others were saying as she and Vince were. He kept trying to listen. He had his gun on his lap—ready to grab up—but Kody was getting a different feeling from the man than she had earlier. Somehow, right now, he didn’t seem as dangerous.

  Floyd inched closer. “Do you really think you can find this treasure stash Dillinger thinks you can find?” he asked, looking first at Kody and then on to Vince. “I guess I never knew the guy. I mean, I hope you can find that treasure. Seems like the only one who can kind of keep Dillinger in check right now is Barrow, but even then…” His voice trailed. He squinted—as if squinting might make him hear more clearly.

  Kody glanced at Vince and then at Floyd. “I don’t know. I mean…we’re following a written trail. Things change. The land out here changes, too.” She hesitated and then asked, “Do you think he’s going to kill us all?”

  Floyd shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. I actually wish I was Capone! Yeah, they’ll get him. Yeah, he’ll go to jail. But he won’t die out here in this godforsaken swamp!”

  “Why don’t you just shoot him?” Vince asked. “You just shoot Dillinger dead when he least expects it. Kody and I disappear until we can get help. You disappear into the world somewhere, too. You don’t want to hurt us, and we won’t turn you in. The three of us—we live.”

  Floyd hesitated, looking away. “Dillinger won’t do it—he, um, he won’t kill us.”

  “He might! Why take a chance?” Vince said.

  Floyd smiled. “Don’t kid yourself. I could never outdraw Barrow. I could never even take him by surprise.” He lifted his shoulders in a hunch and then let them fall. “If I could…no. You’ve got to be careful, toe the line! Barrow is freaked out that Dillinger kidnapped that kid. Barrow can’t take the kid thing and I think he’s pretty sure the boy is stashed somewhere and he’ll wind up dying if we don’t get the truth from Dillinger. He won’t do anything until Dillinger gives up the kid, and now that we’re out here… I don’t know how in hell that’s going to happen.”

  Kody swatted hard at an insect, her mind racing. “If the police just got their hands on Dillinger, they could make him talk.”

  Floyd shook his head. “Dillinger’s real name is Nathan Appleby. I’m not supposed to know any of this. None of us is supposed to know about the others. But I was at this place Dillinger was staying at in the Grove one day and I found some of his papers and then I looked up anything I could about him. He served fifteen years of a life sentence up north. He and some other guys had kidnapped a white-collar executive. He wouldn’t give up the guys he was working with to the cops—or the old crack house where they were holding their hostage. The hostage wound up dying of an overdose shot up into his veins by the people holding him. Nathan’s gang on that one did get away with the money. But one of them betrayed Nathan. That guy wound up in the Hudson River.

  “See, that’s just it—he holds things over on people. Like the guys who brought the airboat. He had papers on them, I’m willing to bet, which would have proven the older man’s—the dad’s, I’m pretty sure—illegal status here in the USA. And, I’m willing to bet, when Nathan gets what he wants here, he’s got some other poor idiot he’s blackmailing somehow to have a mode of transportation available for him that will get him out of the country. Not so hard from here, you know. He can get to the Bahamas or Cuba damned easily, and move on from there.”

  Kody had been so intent on Floyd’s words that she didn’t hear or see Dillinger approaching until Vince nudged her. She turned to see that Dillinger and Barrow had come up on the platform. She wasn’t sure if Dillinger had heard what Floyd had been saying.

  “What’s going on here?” Dillinger asked.

  “I’m telling them that they’d be crazy to try to escape,” Floyd said. “Nowhere to go.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Dillinger said. There was ice in his voice. He raised his gun.

  Kody wasn’t sure what might have happened if she hadn’t moved, and she wasn’t the least sure of what she was doing.

  She was just very afraid that Dillinger was about to shoot Floyd.

  She rolled off the ledge of the chickee hut and landed down on the ground of the little hardwood hammock they had come upon.

  And she began to run.

  He wouldn’t fire at her, would he? Dillinger wouldn’t fire at her!

  She heard a shot. It was a warning shot, she knew. It went far over her head.

  And she stopped running. She couldn’t see anything at all, except for large shadowlike things in the night, created by the weak moonlight that filtered through here and there. She tried to turn and her foot went into some kind of a mud hole. She stood for a moment, breathing deeply, wondering what the hell she had done—and what the hell she could do now.

  She could hide and maybe they wouldn’t find her.

  “Kody.”

  She heard her name spoken softly. It was Barrow. She turned but she couldn’t see him.

  “Stay where you are,” he whispered. “Don’t move.”

  She stood still, puzzled, afraid—and lost.

  And then she understood. At first it sounded as if she was hearing pigs rooting around in a sty. Then she realized the sound was a little different.

  She felt Barrow’s hand on her upper arm, at the same time gentle and firm. He jerked her back, playing a light over the muck she’d just stepped into.

  And right there in the mud hole she saw a good-size group of alligators. They weren’t particularly big, but there were plenty of them gathered together on the surface of the mud.

  She froze and her breath stalled in her throat.

  “Come on!” he said, pulling her away.

  With his urging, she managed to move back. She realized she had come fairly far—the chickee hut and the fire Barrow had built were a distance ahead through a maze of brush and trees. She knew then that this was the opportunity she’d been waiting for. She turned to Barrow.

  “He’s going to kill everyone and you know it,” Kody said.

  “I don’t intend to let him kill everyone,” he said. “You have to believe me.”

  He looked directly into her eyes then and, in the light of the flashlight, she saw his face clearly. She wasn’t sure why, but at that moment she remembered where and when she had seen Barrow before.

  In New York City. She and Kevin had been walking out of Finnegan’s. He’d been telling her that he had a secret new love in his life, and he was very excited. And she had been laughing and telling him she was glad she was all into her career and the move to New York, because she didn’t have anyone who resembled a love—new or old—in her life at all.

  And that’s when she’d plowed into him. Run right into him. He’d been there with another man—Craig Frasier. Of course, she knew Craig Frasi
er because she knew his girlfriend Kieran Finnegan.

  They paused to look at one another, both apologizing and then…

  She’d thought instantly that he felt great, smelled great, had a wonderful smile, and that she wanted to find out more about him. She’d hoped he wasn’t married, engaged or dating, that she’d be able to see him and…

  Then Kevin had grasped her arm and they’d hurried on out and…

  Her mind whirled as the memories assailed her.

  “You’re FBI!” she said.

  His hand on her arm tensed and he pulled her closer. “Shh!”

  “All along, you’re FBI. You could have shot him dead several times now. We’re here, out in the true wilds, the Everglades where even the naturalists and the Native Americans and park rangers don’t come! You could have shot him, you—”

  “Shh! Please!”

  “You didn’t say anything to me! Not a word,” Kody told him. She was shaking, furiously—and still scared as could be.

  “I couldn’t risk it,” he said.

  “But I recognize you—”

  “It took you a while,” he said. “Look, if you’d recognized me and it had shown, and Dillinger had known, or Schultz, or even one of the others, we could all be dead now. I just infiltrated this gang not long ago. It should have been easy enough. We should have gotten into the house. I should have been able to design a way in for the cops and the FBI, but…there’s a little boy out there. Dillinger kidnapped a kid. I have to get him to tell me where he’s holding that boy.”

  She stared at him, sensing his dilemma, because she herself felt torn.

  On the one hand, her desire to survive was strong.

  And on the other hand, she couldn’t let an innocent child die.

  “You’ve had opportunities to tell me,” she said. “I could maybe help.”

  “How?”

  “You’re forgetting—he believes he needs me. He thinks I know all about Anthony Green and the stash of riches from the bank heist Green pulled off years and years ago. Maybe he’ll talk to me. Maybe he will—you don’t know!”