Final Justice, page 30
An hour later, his foot was still throbbing.
“Just get me another drink,” he said when she came in to check on him. “And I’ll rest for a while.”
He awoke to the sound of her crying and quickly rolled out of bed. He hobbled into her room and sat down on the chair next to her bed.
“Oh Grant, I’m an orphan,” she cried. “I’m afraid, and I don’t know what to do.”
“I know how you feel,” he answered, trying to shake his hangover as he got up and sat at the edge of the bed. “I’ve been an orphan since I was ten.
“Here, put your head on my shoulder and we’ll tell each other jokes. Maybe we’ll feel better.”
If someone had asked him how he and Lisa wound up in bed together, why he had kissed her, and why she had kissed him back, he couldn’t have answered. Some would say that they were two mourners clinging to each other, needing a reminder that they were still alive. Others might say that he was drunk and didn’t know what he was doing. Whatever the reason, Grant woke at the first light the next morning, wrapped in a sheet with Lisa. He had little recollection of how, and what had happened, only that they were both naked.
For the first time in his life, Grant Teasdale ran away, unable to cope with what he had done and the emotional chaos that had become his life. He went back to Pt. St. Lucie Florida, to his houseboat and his business. He worked twelve hours a day and whenever his memories became too painful he turned to the bottle. He tried to wipe out what had happened between him and Lisa as just a drunken dream. But he knew that he was just kidding himself, and he was ashamed that he never had the guts to call or face her again.
Elizabeth is going to look after her, he rationalized to himself. She’s in good hands.
I would only be a reminder of a terrible mistake.
The plane made a sharp turn. He gulped down the rest of his drink and leaned back in the seat. His business was booming, his son Kevin was living well in the group home, his parents were getting older but could still manage independently, and Larry, about whom he worried a lot, was still living in Toronto.
He has never gotten over Elizabeth, thought Grant as the plane started its descent. Just like I will never get over Rebecca.
On his way out of the terminal, he stopped at a flower shop to pick up some roses for Elizabeth. Then he bought a magnum of champagne even though he knew there would be plenty to drink at the DeLuca house. He handed the attendant a hundred-dollar bill and while he waited for the change, glanced through the local newspaper. There was a screaming headline about the drug trade and two bullet ridden bodies found near the Charles River. Life goes on—nothing changes.
Ten minutes later he was in a cab heading towards dowtown Boston. He stretched his legs and watched the lights of the city get closer. He thought back to his meeting with Giancarlo Brattini in a Niagara Falls motel room just after he’d left Canada en route to Florida.
Rebecca was a special woman who managed to get under my skin,” said Brattini after a few minutes of small talk. “I’m quite anxious to know why it happened, so I’ll be looking into matters from here. However, I’m afraid that I won’t be able to share anything I might find out with you.”
Grant smiled. “I didn’t expect you to,” he said, “but Rebecca believed that she had some information that might be of help and asked me to deliver it to you personally.”
Brattini went white. “What do you mean by that?”
“She wrote me a letter just before her death,” he answered, amused at Brattini’s fear of the supernatural. “She expected repercussions from the confrontation she had just had and wanted to put her affairs in order before it was too late.”
The two men talked well into the night, finishing a bottle of brandy between them, and before he left, Teasdale gave Brattini a copy of the infamous tape…along with some other material.
“If you need me, I’ll be in my Florida office,” Grant said when he put on his coat to leave. “Rebecca believed that you had no responsibility in her death, and that if you had been able to, you would have stopped it.”
“Yes, I would have,” answered Johnny emphatically. “I know you understand that I will find out everything I need to know, but that it must be dealt with in my own way, which is not necessarily yours.”
“Yes, I understand,” sighed Grant as he shook Brattini’s hand. “As long as it gets done.”
Jeff Jacobs had disappeared three months later. His family filed a missing person report, but he was never found.
Everly Judson was given the option of resigning and keeping his pension or submitting to an investigation that could result in his dismissal and loss of benefits. He chose the former. A week after he’d settled into his Florida condo, he was found in a swamp near Okeechobee, the lower half of his body eaten by alligators.
Former Senator Jack Jacobs was charged with criminal breach of trust for filing false tax returns. He hadn’t disclosed taxable benefits received for services rendered when he was a member of the Senate, a felony. He was stripped of his senate appointment, including his pension, and was embroiled in court proceedings that would last for several more months.
Three months after he was elected Prime Minister of Canada, Richard Dudley was forced to resign. Certain documents, including a videotape and some cancelled cheques fell into the hands of Frank magazine, Canada’s answer to the National Enquirer. This was followed by a police investigation and Dudley was soon charged with corruption. In December of 1998, he was found hanging on a hook in the basement of a male prostitute he had solicited.
So what, thought Grant. There will be new faces and new deals. The game never changes, only the people who play. And my Rebecca? She will still be gone, and I’ll still be alone.
It was nine o’clock and he was standing outside the DeLuca townhouse, overwhelmed by memories.
“Grant, how nice to see you!” smiled Elizabeth when she opened the door. Then she threw her arms around him.
As his bags were taken up to the guestroom, she took his arm and led him into the den.
Looks the same, he thought, but it’s not. It’s the atmosphere that’s different-happy, upbeat, and optimistic.
He was welcomed by the DeLuca brothers, and to his surprise, Michael DeVillers. Matthew was as jovial as ever and Peter, well, he was somehow different from the last time Grant had seen him.
“Inspector, this is Angela Brattini,” said Peter, his arm around her shoulder.
“Angela, how nice to see you again. We met briefly at Santino’s memorial mass.”
“That was three years ago,” smiled Angela. “A lifetime.”
“Yes, a lifetime,” said a familiar voice from the doorway.
Grant turned.
It was Lisa, holding a little boy, maybe a year old, with red hair and blue eyes.
Grant was frozen. He couldn’t take his eyes off the baby. Then he looked up at Lisa, and her warm smile told him all that he needed to know.
“Would you like to hold him?” she asked.
Grant held out his arms.
“Come everyone, let’s go in for dinner,” said Elizabeth. “A new year is coming, and we have so much to celebrate.”
Read the first book in Patti Starr's
THE DELUCA SERIES
Don't forget to follow Patti on her blog
http://patriciastarr.com
Excerpt from Patti Starr's
THE THIRD HOLE
THE DELUCA SERIES
BOOK III
Available Spring 2013
Chapter 2
2012. Cornwall, Ontario.
It was winter and, on this particular night, the undercover agents on assignment were members from the FBI and INSET. They had arrived in Cornwall around midnight and saw that the Mohawk men had parked their Escalade outside a tavern located off Pitt Street, near the main highway. When the team pulled up into the parking lot, they backed up their truck to face both the SUV and the road.
Their assignment was simply to follow the money – to watch and record the smugglers’ network of contacts, safe houses and hopefully, once over the border, the money launderers. The Russians had made serious inroads into the crime business in North America – once the purview of the Italians and the Chinese. Rumours had recently surfaced that they were branching out, incredibly, by enlisting the help of some of the First Nations. Due to the Jay Treaty of 1794 between the United States and Great Britain, the Mohawk had the right to pass between the Canada–US border freely with no checks, and for some it was a smuggler’s dream.
The lead on this project was a woman known only as Sally. Her real name was Jennifer White. She decided it was time to rattle the prey’s cages. Wearing a black ski mask that left only her eyes visible, she got out of the truck and quickly moved like a small iguana along the dirt path over to the Escalade.
That Cadillac has to belong to someone a step or two up the ladder, she thought. Couriers use second-hand vans or trucks.
Once she reached the SUV and saw that it wasn’t armoured, she quickly opened the hood and planted a small explosive device by the ignition; she was excited to see what would happen when it blew and how the smugglers would react. Even though there was no official plan to intervene and no way to stop them from crossing the border into the United States with the money, Jennie had the authority to use her discretion and judgement. She thought that a diversion such as this might net the agents some useful information. She was back in the truck within five minutes.
The door to the tavern opened minutes later and out came three men, obviously drunk. Two got in the back of the SUV, the other took a gym bag out of the trunk, opened the driver’s door and heaved it onto the front seat as he climbed in after it. From the way he had to shove it up and in with his shoulder, the agents knew the bag was full.
As the man slammed his door shut, the entire SUV exploded. The agents initially froze – then started their truck and took off.
“Wait! Stop!” yelled Jennie. “That SUV had to have been wired before we got here. My explosive was a glorified firecracker. Someone set these guys up, and I want to see what I can get from that car before it’s total ashes.”
They spun the truck around and Jennie jumped out and ran in a crouch to the burning SUV. She went around to the driver’s side, which was already crumbling under the heat. She shot through the door and pulled it so hard it came off the hinge. Cringing at the sight of the driver immersed in flames, she grabbed what was left of the gym bag next to him and threw it on the ground. She felt the weight.
The other agents had broken open the back door and managed to pull out the other two men; both were burned horribly – one was obviously dead, but one was still moaning.
“Grab him, put him in our truck!” yelled Jennie. “We’ll take him back to the field office.”
Still there were no sirens, no one visible around the tavern. It was as though what had just happened hadn’t happened at all – like it was expected and no one wanted to be around as a witness. Jennie guessed that the explosive was set off by someone watching the SUV but who couldn’t see the agents nearby. Or it was a remote on a timer.
Jennie sat inside the truck holding the burned Mohawk and pulled out the emergency kit from under the seat as they took off. She found a small tube of Polysporin in the emergency pack – good for minor finger burns, but it was all she had. The man was trying to speak. Jennie was always wired when she was on assignment, so she put her chest and the attached microphone against the man’s face to record anything he said as she tried to soothe him. He spoke a language unfamiliar to Jenny for about a minute, and then he turned his head and died. Jennie had no idea what he said, nor could she remember ever hearing that First Nations dialect before.
The gym bag was in tatters, but what was still left inside appeared to be a huge sack of coloured stones. At first, Jennie missed the diamonds hidden at the bottom next to a rubber pouch that looked like the ones used for their interoffice memos; it was also in tatters. Jennie was pretty sure there could not have been much money in the bag. Millions of dollars, even in large bills, could not have been completely obliterated in such a short time – but heroin or methamphetamine would have. The remnants of foil wrapping reinforced her assessment.
“Well, I guess I’m going to have a lot of explaining to do,” whispered Jennie to her colleagues.
They nodded and grunted.
“The good news is that if we hadn’t planned our little operation, we would have missed the diamonds, and the explosion would have gone unnoticed, at least to us, for some time. The bad news is that we have nothing else to show…yet. Just a little rubber pouch – let’s hope there’s some good stuff inside it.”
Inside that rubber pouch was a scrap of paper – what was left of a memo that had an Israeli foreign ministry stamp over words that were now barely legible: “P&M, Latchman & Howard Ramsay” as well as what looked like “The 3rd hole.”
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Patti Starr, Final Justice
