Redemption Key (A Dani Britton Thriller) (3 page)

6:48am, 83° F

Oren unlocked the cash register and flipped on the ceiling fans. He didn’t bother with the overhead lights. It was already hot, and anyone headed to Jinky’s at this hour didn’t need lights to find their way.
They could hear Rolly humming to himself in the kitchen as he prepped for breakfast.

“Is Peg going to cover the bar for you during the meeting?” Oren asked. “You know how Joaquin likes you to serve him his drinks.”

Dani rolled her eyes and nodded. Oren laughed.

He had taken over Jinky’s from his former coke dealer when the man had decided to flee the country. Along with all the fixtures, the booze, and the debt, he’d inherited Jinky’s former girlfriend Peg as a waitress and Rolly, the short-order cook. That was seventeen years ago, and both Peg and Rolly had stayed on, keeping their own hours, setting their own pay. Oren didn’t mind. Finding good help in the transient population of the islands wasn’t easy. Besides, he was scared of Peg, and even after all these years he wasn’t sure what Rolly’s real name was or even where he lived. Sometimes life in the Keys was like that.

Dani fit in like she was born to it. First of all, the regulars were so used to the disdain of Peg, the younger woman seemed like a ray of sunshine in comparison. At least she didn’t throw the drinks onto the table. And while it had been more than a decade and a half since coke accounted for the majority of the bar’s profits, the clientele hadn’t become overly reputable. Jinky’s maintained its aura of slightly shady, slightly rough local watering hole, frequented by the type of drinkers who like their bartenders on the less engaging side.

There were always exceptions, especially during high season. More than half of the season visitors were yearly regulars—fishermen and snorkelers, stoners and hippies, who liked to get away from the commercialism of the other Keys. What they didn’t realize was that their presence created the very commercialism they were trying to escape, but the locals accepted them—and their money—with a fair amount of equilibrium. Two-thirds of Oren’s rooms had been booked from February through June, and the season had been lucrative.

“Don’t forget,” Dani said, rinsing off a bowl of lemons, “the Texans are checking out of Five today.”

“Any chance they’ll take the Australians with them?” A group of Australians in Room Six had broken the two windows and the air-conditioner, and backed up the toilet at least every other week since taking the place at the end of June. “You might as well close off the rest of the cottages after the Texans go. We probably won’t need any rooms but the four in the unit across the way, and even those’ll be mostly for meetings.” Except for an isolated weekend here or there, Jinky’s rental units would be at a near standstill, tourist-wise, until November.

Oren had foolishly thought he could cut Dani from the payroll at the end of the season. He’d even told Peg that, only to face her braying laugh. She’d known all along that he’d never have the heart to throw the strange, quiet girl out. More than once Oren wondered who was actually running this joint.

Dani had proven herself valuable in more ways than one. For one thing, she seemed impossible to gross out. Fish heads and backed-up toilets, dead rats and vomiting kids, nothing made her flinch. Plus she could rig up fixes for the endless list of breakdowns in the old camp. Windows, air-conditioners, even the listing kayak dock—she’d pick through the old toolboxes and rescue bits of metal and wood from the debris pile hidden behind the clump of sea grape at the water’s edge and cobble together a workable and inexpensive solution.

She didn’t take up any room. When he’d found her sleeping in her car, he’d told her to fix up the kayak shack until she could make other arrangements. Since she had access to the master key for the units, Oren had assumed she would make herself at home in one of the cottages, sneaking her linens in and out with the renters’. But no, she’d repaired a crappy old cot, wired in some screens, and scrubbed out an old beer fridge. She’d asked permission to use rental sheets, to park her car under the carport, even to hang that rope from the upper deck of Jinky’s. Why she’d wanted to keep her clothes in a rubber tub in the bait shop was beyond him, but if it didn’t bother Peg, why fight it?

But where she really sealed her place at Jinky’s was at his meetings. He’d been glad to have her serve drinks at his meetings rather than Peg. Dani was small and unthreatening, cute but not overly so. She kept her eyes down and her mouth shut and moved so quietly and efficiently, people often forgot she was there.

If they only knew.

The first meeting she’d served had been between Angel Jackson and some Ohio gangster wannabe who wanted the black-eyed pilot to help him move some weed through the Keys. Oren had sat back, letting the two men hash out the details, until Dani had asked him to step outside with her. She’d told him the Ohioan was lying, and his money was fake. She’d been so blunt and dispassionate about it, so confident, that Oren had gone right in, upended the dealer’s bag and discovered that all but the top layer of cash bundles were cut newspaper wrapped in hundred-dollar bills.

He’d let Angel handle the rest.

Oren didn’t ask how Dani had known, and she hadn’t offered. But he’d had her serve every meeting since, even ones with the Wheelers.

On the neighboring Keys, even as far up as Miami, Oren Randolph was known as “that guy.” When someone needed a set of fake IDs good enough to get through customs, they called Oren. If they needed a connection to certain groups of influence, they called Oren. Technically, Oren bought and sold nothing but drinks and seafood, but he was the guy who knew the guy who sold the things, legal and not, that people needed. And he had a reputation for discretion as well as connections to smooth over the more questionable transactions on many levels. Oren thought of himself as a resource manager, an information broker.

The Wheeler boys were an unfortunate third-generation inheritance that came with Jinky’s. Juan and Joaquin Wheeler probably weren’t brothers in anything other than their full-fledged psychosis.
Their major business consisted of smuggling and bloodshed from Miami to Key West. They had overthrown the previous psychopath who had controlled the heroin traffic, said psychopath being the man who had so unnerved Jinky as to cause the coke dealer to run for his life to points unknown. Before that unlikely event, Oren Randolph had considered Jinky to be the most dangerously deranged human he had ever known.

Seventeen years and many, many horrific tales later Oren’s horizons had broadened.

As always, Dani seemed to read his mind. “Looking forward to another chance to get chummy with Juan Wheeler?”

Oren shook his head. “Trust me. Nobody does business with the Wheelers by choice. Luckily for me, they seem to hold me in something of a favored, protected light—some Wheeler combination of elder worship and historic preservation.” He slammed the register shut. “I don’t care if they put me on an endangered species list; they haven’t killed me or anyone dear to me.”

“Yet.”

“Yet. But hey”—he nudged her and gave her a wink—“I think Joaquin has got his eye on you. His good one, that is.”

Dani laughed. Oren liked the sound of it. Quiet little stone-faced Dani handled the clumsy passes and drool—yes, actual drool—with finesse. Joaquin still ogled, she still served him, and all of them kept breathing.

For now.

That the Wheelers had come to him needing a connection had been bad enough; when they told him with pride that they were orchestrating a deal for Simon Vincente, a known butcher, arms dealer, and all around tornado of evil throughout the entire state of Florida, he’d almost balked. Almost. But everyone knew that anyone saying no to Vincente usually got as far as “Nuh” before losing at least one favored body part.

The only upside in the dismal deal was that Vincente and the Wheelers knew exactly who they were looking for, just not how to find him. That’s why they came to Oren, trusting that his contacts ran deep. So he’d called around and found their man—a Canadian gangster named Bermingham. Oren learned the man was a butcher in his own right who had ways to grease the wheels of Canadian customs, and a habit of creating scenes that needed bleach to clean up.

Terrific.

He didn’t know who was selling what to whom, and he wanted to keep it that way. But Bermingham had insisted the meeting take place before ten in the morning, and Juan Wheeler always liked to be an hour or two early for meetings. That didn’t give Oren much time to contact the FBI.

7:15am, 84° F

Oren fished his phone from his pocket and dialed Caldwell’s number from memory. As usual, he heard the sound of feminine giggling before the agent spoke.

“This had better be important.” Caldwell’s voice sounded thick with sleep.

“If you had called me back last night, you’d have known that the Wheelers are coming in today.”

He heard something slapping flesh and a high-pitched squeal. “I was busy last night.”

“Well we’re all going to be busy today. Let’s talk.”

“Where are you?”

“Where do you think I am?” Oren climbed onto his usual barstool. “I’d wager I’m a hell of a lot closer to my office than you are to yours.”

“That goes without saying.” Caldwell groaned into the phone. “Give me twenty minutes. And I’m putting my drinks on your tab.”

“That goes without saying too, doesn’t it?”

“Not too early for a mojito, is it?”

“Is it ever?”