Shallow Breeze, page 19
part #2 of Pine Island Coast Florida Series
“If he got away, yes. The plan is for him to come here.”
“How safe is this place? How many people know about it?” Deneford asked. He turned to the window and spread the plastic blinds open with his fingers, looking out like he expected the wrong people to show at any moment.
Now that he had informed Deneford of the situation and made it to the safe house without incident, Nunez was calm. “Only me, Cardoza, and three others. One is in prison and the other two are in Atlanta right now.”
“So no one else who would have been at Ridgeside tonight would know?”
“That is correct. Don’t worry, my friend. Everything will be fine. You and I both know that Eric would never give up this location, even if he was caught.”
“If they find that flash drive, my cover is blown and the last two years are for naught.”
“No. Not for nothing,” Nunez replied. “We’ve all made a lot of money. Remember, my friend, you brought Eric into this, not me. It is going to be fine. Just relax.” He looked at the refrigerator. “There should be beer in there. Go have a couple.”
Deneford stood and walked past the stove. He opened the refrigerator and ducked down. There was only a half-empty jar of mayonnaise, a small jar of hot sauce, and a six pack of Negra Modelo. He grabbed a bottle and searched the label. “How old is this stuff?”
“Few months maybe? It’s not right off the line, but it's still good. Bring me one.”
Deneford grabbed three and sat back down, twisted all three caps off with his forearm, then handed one to Nunez.
“Gracias.”
They sat silently at the table for the next five minutes, drinking their beers and hoping that Eric Cardoza would show. Deneford started tapping his foot nervously on the floor. “Call him,” he finally said. “Find out where he is.”
Nunez put a hand on top of his large belly, paused, and let out a loud belch. “I’ll give him a few more minutes. Cops could be scanning the cell towers because of the bust tonight. Either way we sleep here tonight.” He set his beer down. “I’m going to take a leak.” He pulled up on his shorts and left the kitchen, crossed the living room and started down the hallway, turning into the guest bathroom on his left. He flicked the light switch on. The light didn’t respond. He flicked it on and off. Still nothing. Light bulbs were in the garage. He would worry about that later. Nunez walked to the end of the hallway until he arrived at the master bedroom. He strode across the beige carpet and flicked on the master bathroom light. He was far enough from the kitchen to not bother shutting the door as a courtesy. He walked up to the toilet and pulled up on the lid.
It didn’t budge.
He tried again. Still, nothing. Nunez mumbled to himself and leaned forward as he tried to troubleshoot why the lid was jammed. This time he wedged the fingers of both hands around the edge and pulled with a long grunt. The stubborn lid stayed where it was, practically glued to the bowl. He stood over it and stared, mystified. That’s when a sound came from behind him, the rings of the shower curtain sliding against the curtain rod.
He turned and then wished he hadn’t.
Something slammed into his throat and took away his ability to breathe. He swiveled and leaned forward, clutching his throat and trying in vain to suck in a breath. He heard the bathroom door shut softly behind him and the small exhaust fan turn on. The ungreased fan squealed softly, rhythmically.
Ellie swiveled him around, grabbed a chunk of his short hair, and pulled his face in to her knee. His nose shattered on the impact. Fire-laced pain shot through his face, radiating out through his cheekbones and into his temples. He wanted to scream, but couldn't. He still couldn’t breathe from the punch she had landed to his trachea. With the speed of a cobra, she turned him around, snaked an arm across his throat, and placed her bicep over his neck, putting him into a rear naked choke.
Nunez was only an inch taller than she, but since he appeared to have an extra hundred pounds on her she squatted and leaned his weight against her thigh and slowly brought him backwards until she was sitting against the edge of the bathtub. She squeezed harder, and the blood running to his brain started to taper. Nunez thrashed around, his left arm smacking the shower curtain, his right hand trying to reach back and grab his assailant. Then, in a last act of desperation, he reached down and grabbed the soft flesh of her inner thigh, pinching hard. Then he twisted. The pain was excruciating. But Ellie knew how to ignore pain, and she knew that the pinch, while painful, wouldn’t cause any muscle damage that wouldn’t be gone in a week. She squeezed Nunez tighter, and the pressure on his carotid artery increased. His left arm flapped out, shook twice, and his body went limp as he lost consciousness. She held the choke for one final second and released. She slid out from underneath him and quietly lowered him to the tile floor.
She stood there catching her breath, rubbing her thigh, and looking down on the local kingpin she had been chasing for the last couple months. His chin was pointed toward the ceiling. His polo rode up, exposing a large, fatty section of his hairy stomach. Here he was. The man the DEA had been unable to find for over five years. She looked toward the bathroom door.
There was one more person to deal with.
And she knew just how to do it.
Chapter Thirty-Five
She had to slide Nunez's body to the far end of the narrow bathroom to allow her space to open the door.
Ellie turned the fan off and put her ear to the door. The whole scuffle had been relatively quiet, couldn’t have made enough noise to hear beyond the bedroom. Still, she opened the door with care. She stood to the side and looked toward the bedroom door, and then, using the window reflection, she checked the rest of the room. Satisfied, she stepped out and silently opened the door to the master closet. Nothing.
She heard the hollow thud of a beer bottle being returned to a wooden tabletop. Deneford was still at the table, finishing off a stale beer. He would expect Nunez back soon.
Right now, Ellie had two options before her. She could pull her handgun, still holstered on her thigh, and come upon an unsuspecting Deneford and arrest him. Or...she chewed her bottom lip as she thought...she could have a little fun with this.
She chose the latter.
Moving quickly, Ellie brought out one of the two phones in her possession, opened the voice memo app, and kept an ear out for movement in the main bedroom doorway. She touched the pad of her finger on the red record button, and, after waiting fifty seconds and still hearing faint movement in the kitchen, she stepped into the closet. The small space was filled with black life vests, surplus blankets, and a few sleeping bags. Several boxes lined the shelves above a sparsely populated hanger bar. It would be enough to muffle the sound of her voice.
She held the phone out in front of her and shut the closet door. Then, she began
speaking.
* * *
When Ellie tapped the glass again, the phone saved the sound recording. She cautiously opened the door to the closet and heard a clatter from the kitchen - a couple bottles clinking together - and knew it was safe to come out.
She walked over to the bed and fished her second iPhone from her pocket. Not knowing who would be in the house, or if several would come at once, she had taken the extra phone from the car for just this purpose. She set both devices to silent and made a FaceTime call from one to the other. She answered it when the call came through, and both phones showed a video of Ellie and the bedroom.
She thumbed the phone she had used in the closet, opened the memo app, hit play, and then brought the phone application back up. She turned the volume all the way up. Then, she leaned the phone against a pillow, tilted it, and walked to the window.
She had forty seconds.
* * *
Ellie snaked her way around the outside of the house and stepped quietly into the abandoned landscaping near the kitchen’s bay window. The backyard was much like her own. A small, grassy area that ended at the top edge of a canal, although there was more grass. With the indoor light of the kitchen, she could see Deneford’s large shadow against the mill-white of the cheap, plastic window blinds. He wasn’t moving. She waited ten more seconds then heard Deneford yell toward the bedroom.
“What?”
She waited, then heard him repeat himself.
“What?”
The second one sounded confused, a little less confident. His shadow disappeared. Ellie, staying low, peered through the tiny holes where the polyester threaded through the slats in the blinds.
He was gone.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The beers weren’t the best. They weren’t the worst either. He preferred a craft beer over a Modela anyday, but now wasn’t the time to be picky. The bottles clinked together as he tossed them into the plastic garbage can. He paced the kitchen. When Nunez got back from the restroom, he would inform him that he was leaving, taking Nunez’s boat and getting out of here. He wasn’t comfortable here. Nunez could come or he could stay. He didn’t care either way. Over the years he had learned to trust his instincts. There were other places to hide, if that’s what he needed to be doing right now. Something about this place wasn’t right. He liked to have control over where he fled, and he knew nothing about this location.
He stopped pacing and stood near the window. He thought of Eric Cardoza and hoped that the man could run as well as he could steal. It wasn’t supposed to go down like this. Eric was going to get a firm fist in the gut when he saw him next. If there was a next time. It was a poor choice, he knew, giving that flash drive to Eric. It contained maps of the entire coastline with highlighted areas for potential drop points. It also contained a digital footprint that would lead them right to his door. It was sloppy, not retrieving the information from a secured computer that couldn’t be traced back to him. And it was also sloppy to provide him with a flash drive instead of simply printing out the maps. But that wasn’t what he had done, and now Trigg Deneford wondered if they might have to reconsider the entire front for their operation.
He heard Nunez call out to him from the back of the house. “What?” he yelled. He heard his name again, different this time. He must have drunk the beers too fast. It sounded like a woman’s voice. “What?” he called again. He exited the kitchen, walked across the living room, and peered down the hall. “Nunez?”
“Stop it!” It was a woman. “Stop it! Let go of me! Trigg. Trigg, stop him! Get off of me!”
All of a sudden Deneford felt like he was in a fog. Shirley Dunham? Here? It didn’t make sense. Still, that was her voice coming frantically down the hall. It was her who was crying out, telling Nunez to get off of her.
He reached behind his back and brought out his handgun. He moved cautiously down the hall.
“Agh! Let...go...”
His heart was thumping. What in the hell was going on? He stopped just short of the door and peered into the room.
There was no one there. No voices. No Shirley Dunham.
Nothing. Not even Nunez. The yelling startled him as it began again. Coming from...the bed? Were they under the bed?
Was that a phone?
* * *
Ellie waited outside, watching the feed from the bedroom phone until she saw Trigg Deneford’s head poke out around the bedroom door, his gun in hand. She removed her Glock from her thigh holster and, careful not to let the flimsy blinds make a sound, she slipped through the bay window she had unlocked soon after she had arrived. Unlocking windows in each room allowed for any number of possible engagements.
On the drive here, Ellie had planned for several possibilities. Assuming the address Eric Cardoza had provided was indeed the right location, would anyone be there? If it was the right address, would anyone come at all? If they did, how many would there be?
She had parked at the far end of the street, walked to the house from there. There was no way to be certain that the house was empty, but there were no boats docked at the canal, no cars in the driveway. She had listened through the windows at two sides and heard nothing. The only measure of light emanating from the inside of the home was a soft glow from above the oven range. If it truly was a safe house, whoever was occupying it would be there because they felt a measure of security, of safety. They would feel no need to hide under the shroud of an interior darkness.
So Ellie had called Glitch, gave him the address and told him to help her get past the alarm. A landscape sign told her and the rest of the neighborhood that the home was secured by Finley Security Systems. Within three minutes Glitch had a code for her. After picking the front door lock with two paper clips she found in the cruiser, Ellie entered and cleared each room, ensuring that no one was present before searching the entire house for weapons. She had come away with a Springfield 1911 9mm Luger pistol from the kitchen drawer, a loaded Ruger Blackhawk revolver from between the couch cushions, and two 12 gauge shotguns from under the guest room bed. The house’s decor and utility was scant. It was clearly not lived in. The home had a stale smell that emanated from unused toilets and sink drains. She located only two cutting knives in the kitchen. All the other utensils were plastic and disposable. Ellie had taken all the weapons and put them in the attic via the pull-down staircase.
The presence of the weapons and the nearly vacant nature of the home confirmed that a knife in the thigh was all that Eric Cardoza needed to be truthful. So Ellie planned for an arrival. And Mateo Nunez had indeed shown. He had come and walked right in and turned the page into his final chapter as a local drug kingpin, because tonight Ellie would make sure he left here in handcuffs. What Ellie hadn’t planned for, however, was a two-for-one special. Nunez hadn’t come alone; he hadn’t come with a couple low-level bodyguards. No, he had brought a friend. A friend that Ellie was beginning to know quite well. Christmas had come early.
She heard Deneford speak from down the hall.
“What the hell…”
She had already ended the live video feed on the phone, but she knew just where he was. He was right where she wanted him to be. She stepped up to the alarm’s keypad and punched in a secondary code that Glitch had given her. The code silently registered, and a dim neon-green light flashed twice to let her know it had taken. Now, if anyone decided to open a door or a window to make a quick escape, Ellie would be notified by a quick, double-chime from the keypad.
Ellie returned her attention to the master bedroom at the opposite end of the house. She was now facing down a formidable adversary in Trigg Deneford, one who, during his time with the SEALs, had been sculpted and molded into a close combat warrior, proficient in weapons handling.
Ellie had the psychological advantage of knowing who she was up against; Deneford did not. He didn’t know who was in the house with him. The first thing he would have done after seeing the phone and realizing he’d been duped would have been to secure the room. She had to assume that, by now, Deneford had found Nunez.
Moving into the living room, she stopped at the corner leading back into the hallway. The master bedroom door was now twenty feet down the hall. She heard muffled voices. Nunez was back; probably groggy, probably feeling like his head was about to fracture outward from the pressure the lack of oxygen had caused.
Ellie knew that Deneford wouldn’t like feeling trapped and wouldn’t like not knowing who and where his opponent was. He would either go out the window or he would clear the hallway and make his way back into the main part of the house. A professional like him, who had just been had by Shirley Dunham calling out for help; that kind of man would stay. He would stay and face-off.
Walking backwards and keeping her gun trained in front, Ellie traced a path back through the living room and into the kitchen. She heard more whispers, and then the alarm pad at the rear door chimed twice. She heard the muted shuffle of a window being drawn up in the master bedroom. Someone, or both of them, had decided to leave. Ellie left the kitchen and moved into a small, empty bedroom that looked out onto the canal. Stepping up to the window she twisted the rod to the blinds. She slit them open and stepped back against the far wall. Now, she could cover the entrance to the room and, at the same time, keep a view on the outside.
Deneford would have two choices: he could clear the rooms down the hallway or he could move back up toward the living room and, starting with the guest bathroom, clear the house room-by-room. If, that is, he was still in the house. Ellie listened, waited, trying to grab any sound that would let her know what decision he had made.
A shadow moved in the backyard and caught her eye. She tensed. A large figure was hunched down, moving back to the dock. It was Nunez. She watched as he stopped, rubbed his pockets, and shook his head. He turned around and moved quickly back to the rear door. Ellie heard the door open, heard it squeak quietly on an ungreased hinge and Nunez start to speak before two gunshots erupted from the living room. Trigg Deneford sent two rounds speeding into Nunez’s chest, surely the last thing on his mind being that his partner would just come waltzing through the back door.
A grunt came from the kitchen, and what Ellie heard, but couldn't see, was Mateo Nunez, reaching for a kitchen chair to stabilize himself, trying not to fall. He found his balance, but only momentarily. Deneford cursed from the living room but stayed where he was. He watched as his partner fell sideways and hit the linoleum with a thud.
She heard Nunez mumble through the blood rushing up his esophagus and into his mouth. “The...the...keys...”
Nunez tried to breathe, but no air came in. A gurgling mess of thick blood ran down the corner of his mouth and pooled on the floor, mingling with blood flowing freely from his chest. His surprised eyes blinked three times, and the last thought he ever had, after wishing he had kept the boat’s keys on his person, was how very dirty the kitchen floor was.
