Secondary Targets (26 page)

“Hopefully the police will locate
your wallet
pretty soon,” Eric said. “In the meantime, you might want to continue to play that
I-can’t-remember-anything
card until you’re out of here and you’ve had a chance to mull over who Julian Turner really is.”

“Yeah, but, what if they don’t find it?” he said. “What do I do then?”

“You’ll come stay with us.” Eric took a second to glance at Grace, who nodded. “There, you’ll get the chance to figure out everything about the identity, and, slowly you can get your memory back.”

“Of course that’s what you’ll do,” Grace said. “Besides, we have to make sure there’s no one else left out there who’s after us.”

The television went into a local news program. “Police discovered two bodies in a warehouse along the East River in Brooklyn this morning.” That statement drew all eyes to the TV. “Both individuals suffered fatal gunshot wounds. Police are withholding the identities of the victims until notification of the next of kin.”

That was it, there was nothing more to the story. The news anchor went straight into a human interest piece.

Eric, Grace, and Marcus all followed each other’s gazes around the room like they were in a conga line. The difference was, the tune playing was bewilderment layered with a pinch of panic.

Two bodies? Just two? That wasn’t good. There were three of them yesterday. They’d all thought, obviously incorrectly, that they’d neutralized each of them, but one of them was still alive. And worse yet…they’d gotten away.

But who...who survived?

CHAPTER 43

Small Town, USA
Ten Years Later

CHATTER from a dozen conversations filtered through the air, laughter resided in many. The Coopers’ barbeques were the coveted neighborhood place to be. If one had managed to acquire an invitation, then they could safely say they were part of the “in” crowd.

The last few parties the Coopers had hosted entertained nearly one hundred guests. Luckily, the backyard was roomy and bountiful with plenty of room for their guests.

Lively conversation, good food, good drink—both alcoholic and non-alcoholic—was always available. The pool had been a great idea. It preoccupied the children. No wonder everyone wanted an invite.

Doug and Katey Cooper were undoubtedly living the proverbial American dream. They’d come from New York City to live a quiet and peaceful life in this non-descript little town. Rumor had it, they’d made a killing in the stock market several years ago, back when they lived in New York City.

The barbeques had started out as a friendly, “
hi, we’re new to the area and we’d like to get to know our neighbors
,” sort of thing. The first year, attendance was scarce. But once people got to know the Coopers, attendance began picking up every year and lately the parties had grown so wildly popular that they decided to throw the barbeques sometimes three and four times a year.

This barbeque was the first for this year. Spring had arrived and now the sweet scent of lilacs, jasmine, and honeysuckle drifted intoxicatingly through the air.

Doug Cooper scanned the crowd, searching until he found her. His wife, Katey. His gaze fell upon her and stayed there. Amazing, he still enjoyed the simple act of looking at her just as much today as he did the first time he’d laid eyes on her.

Doug, now approaching the big five-0, was trim and fit and still looked good, or so his wife told him—daily. Women of his acquaintance hadn’t missed his robust physique either, but Doug was a one-woman man, and that had made some women quite envious of Katey Cooper.

His wife was an amazing woman with an eternally youthful quality about her beauty. In her early forties, Katey rarely admitted to being anything more than thirty-something.

With her youthful appearance and delightful personality, women wanted to be her and men simply wanted to be with her.

Watching his wife, with a crafty smile on his thoughts, Doug could easily guess that she was setting someone up to secure a donation from them at a later date for the West Side Clinic.

Doug’s thoughts of his wife were interrupted by his youngest child tugging at his shorts. “Daddy…” his daughter said, gazing up at him, “Michael said I can’t play with the ball.”

At the age of seven, Grace Cooper had quickly and aptly learned the art of wrapping her father around her little finger. With a few words from that sweet voice of hers, along with some effective batting of those deep green eyes that stood out so prominently against her russet brown hair, which always reminded him of chocolate, and he was putty in her hands. He knew it, but he didn’t care.

Doug surveyed the pool in search of his eldest son Michael, who’d just turned nine last month.

Grace was a beautiful combination of her mother and her father, while her eldest brother, on the other hand, didn’t look a thing like either one of them. But Doug wasn’t worried.

He recognized the boy’s amazing resemblance to his maternal grandfather, Katey’s dad, also his namesake.

Grace’s twin brother, Eric, was gifted with the facial features of his mother, along with her eyes, and Doug’s blond hair. Fiercely independent and with a multitude of charisma, Katey constantly said that someday her baby boy would end up breaking more than a few hearts.

Doug’s eyes locked with Michael’s and the boy tossed the ball in question out of the water and onto the grass.

“Michael.” Doug stared at him. “It won’t be much fun if you have to sit on the sidelines and watch, will it?”

The boy should know that tone by now, and he’d do well not to push Doug. Not unless he wanted to ruin his chances of helping with the new project Doug was starting next week.

Doug scooped up the ball and handed it to his daughter.

She clutched it in her small hands and flashed him a grateful smile. She batted her eyes a couple of times and said, “Thank you, Daddy.”

And Doug’s heart melted.

Katey walked up and laced her arm around Doug’s. “She got you again, didn’t she?” His wife’s jolly laughter bounced off him.

“Yeah.” Doug knew when he was beat and tore his gaze away from his daughter. Instead, he concentrated on his wife now. “She got that from her mother,” he said with a wink.

Neither Doug nor Katey had had any regrets about settling down in this quiet little town. They’d made the decision when they’d found out Katey was expecting their first child. They’d decided they wanted to raise their expanding family in a calm, quiet, and safe atmosphere if that was at all possible. A small community afforded the best chance of that happening.

The basis of their newfound philosophy, they said, was Julian Turner.

The Coopers developed a strong bond with Julian after finding him lying in the parking lot of a mall in Brooklyn. He’d been shot. The attending physician in the emergency room at Brooklyn Hospital Center was Dr. Angela Marcum, a pretty black woman who, at the time, was in her early thirties.

When Julian awakened sometime later, seemingly at a loss for details regarding the shooting, the police dubbed the incident a mugging gone badly due to the fact that Julian’s wallet and identification were missing when he was found. Dr. Marcum speculated that the trauma of being robbed at gunpoint and subsequently shot had brought about the inability to recall the incident.

Several days later the police recovered a wallet with a California driver’s license and several credit cards. The billfold belonged to Julian Turner, a real estate mogul from out west. The photograph on the driver’s license was how the mugging victim in the Brooklyn Hospital Center was identified as Julian Turner.

Wanting to settle down into an uneventful life, the Coopers set out in search of a quiet life in a tranquil little town. After settling into their new home, their good friend Julian and his new girlfriend Dr. Angela Marcum came for a visit.

Extremely pleased with the quaint picture of small town life, Julian found that he, like his new friends, was right at home.

It didn’t take him long to persuade Angela to marry him. And just a few months after the Coopers had moved into the neighborhood, the house across the street came up for sale. Julian and his new wife bought the house and moved in promptly.

Angela ended up pregnant right around the time Katey gave birth to Michael, and she was insistent that if their child were a boy they would name him Julian, after his father.

Julian obliged his wife. But when Angela gave birth to a second son, about a year after Katey had the twins, he insisted they name the child Marcus. His reasoning was that he’d had a good friend once named Marcus, but, unfortunately he was dead.

And now, here at the Coopers’ barbeque the Turner children played together enthusiastically with the Cooper children in the Cooper’s swimming pool.

“Cooper…” A neighbor, John Starrett, approached Doug with a jovial laugh. “Are you ready to sell me that Shelby?”

“Oh, my good friend...” Doug shook his head. “She is not for sale.”

“And even if she was,” Julian chimed in with a sharp laugh. “You’d be hard pressed to afford her.”

John laughed on the outside, but Doug knew, on the inside the remark dug under the man’s skin.  

Everybody knew the Turners and the Coopers had money, a lot more than anybody else in this sleepy little town. The thing that made them likeable, Doug thought, was that they didn’t make a big production of their wealth.

Surreptitiously, John Starrett fancied himself as being the one true friend that neither Doug Cooper nor Julian Turner knew they needed. He had grand illusions that one day he’d finally get the opportunity to display that friendship and from there on out, he would be the center of their world.

But it was highly unlikely, virtually impossible, that he could live up to his golden desires. Other than Doug and Julian, no one else could ever know the bond that existed between the two men. Nobody but Doug’s wife. She was the only person that knew a wedge could never be driven between the two friends.

And even if it could, it’d never happen by the likes of John Starrett. He reminded Doug too much of a guy he used to know who went by the name of Holloway. Doug hated that guy.

“Since everybody’s so curious about the Shelby, maybe you should go ahead and tell them,” Julian said to Doug.

“Maybe you’re right,” Doug agreed. “Maybe it’s high time the neighborhood started contributing and giving back to the community.”

Julian and Doug both let out a wily chuckle. No wonder they were the best of friends. When they weren’t fishing or hunting, they dabbled in the restoration of classic and antique vehicles.

The word had gotten around about their work. People had been coming from all over, for years, making inquiries and requests about their cars.

Doug had insisted that he wasn’t looking to go into business. This was nothing more than a diversion for him. Julian felt pretty much the same way.

Julian, like Doug, didn’t need to make more money. They both had plenty of that.

But, with a little persuasion from his practical business-minded wife, Doug was able to see the light. Katey, who’d once had a successful career as a fundraiser, showed him how to finance their hobby without dipping into resources that were better spent securing their children’s future.

With an annual car show and auction, Katey suggested they could easily finance their ventures for the upcoming year.

Doug had to admit, it was a great idea. Brilliant in fact. It would also be a grand gesture to charge an admission fee and donate those funds to the West Side Clinic.            

The clinic was initially Angela’s project. Even in the midst of doing her fair share of populating the little town they lived in, she was not quite ready to give up practicing medicine. With Julian and the Coopers’ help, she opened up the West Side Clinic in their small town.

The clinic offered medical care to those who needed it. If the patient could afford to pay something, then they paid whatever they could. If they couldn’t afford to pay anything, that was okay, too.

Angela had persuaded Katey to volunteer a few hours several days a week to come in and help her out with administrative duties. And again, Katey Cooper used her business savvy to turn the clinic into a phenomenal success.

Quickly, she organized the health center, setting up a daycare on site, which she’d initially intended to use to care for hers and Angela’s children. But by the time it was up and running, it also offered free daycare to the employees of the clinic. Eventually, they offered free daycare to patients who didn’t have anywhere else to leave their children when they needed to see a doctor.

Katey Cooper was also quite effective in organizing benefits and fundraisers for the clinic. She had an uncanny ability to talk the money right out of anybody’s pockets. It didn’t matter who they were, no one was safe when she set her sights on their wallets.

“May I have your attention...” Doug beckoned the consideration of his guests. “Since we’ve had quite a few inquiries about the Shelby, I suppose I might as well get right to it.”

Wait until they all got a load of the Cuda he and Julian had just brought in. They planned to begin the restoration next week, and Doug’s son Michael was going to help.

Michael loved going into the garage with Doug and Julian, and they enjoyed teaching him about the cars. They showed him how to handle each step of the process properly and Michael took to it and thrived on the restoration procedure.

“Is it for sale?” John Starrett asked eagerly of the Shelby, even though Julian had been right about him. Starrett would never be able to afford the value of that car. And even if he could, his wife would never allow it.

“Nope, it’s not for sale,” Doug said with a little shake of the head. “As some of you know, Julian and I have a little hobby.”

“An expensive little hobby, too.” Someone out in the crowd chuckled.

“That’s very true,” Doug said. “Every year, we have a car show and an auction, mainly because that’s the only way my wife says I can keep doing it next year.” He winked at Katey. “We use the money from the auction to finance our restoration projects for the upcoming year. Now I’m not one to solicit at these barbeques because I consider them to be an informal get-together. But, since we’ve had a few inquiries about the Shelby, we thought we’d let everyone know…” Doug paused, catching his breath and his wife eyed him with a curious,
what-are-you-up-to
look.

Neither she, nor Angela—as far as Doug knew—had any idea about his and Julian’s plans for the Shelby.

“We’re going to sell raffle tickets at the car show...and just let me say this now, before everyone stops listening…” This was going to create quite the buzz. “The Shelby is insured for one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. We are going to sell raffle tickets at one hundred dollars per ticket. You can buy as many tickets as you like, and, so long as we sell at least five hundred tickets...some lucky person is going to win that Shelby.” Doug paused to let the chattering die down, and then he continued. “The reason we want to raise at least fifty grand is because we are donating the money to Angie and Katey’s clinic.”

The crowd burst into applause. They all knew what the clinic meant to their small community.

Katey and Angela showered their respective husbands with sweet kisses.

“That gesture is going to pay off big-time for you, Mr. Cooper.” Katey’s promise breezed against Doug’s ear and rolled thrilling thoughts through his mind.

“I’m going to hold you to that, Mrs. Cooper.” He sealed it with a smile.

When the Coopers weren’t throwing neighborhood barbeques, or Doug and Julian weren’t fixated on some automobile that they were bringing back to life, and Katey and Angela had left the clinic in the capable hands of the staff for the day, there was nothing that either of the two couples loved better than spending a lazy Saturday afternoon sitting on their respective front porch swings.