Page 55 of South of Nowhere (Colter Shaw #5)

55.

Waylon Foley was the first to admit he led a good life.

When he wasn’t running jobs like the one he was currently in the midst of, or hunting in Montana or Utah or, well, name your state, he spent much of his time in Key West, not far from Ernest Hemingway’s home, ever populated with tourists and six-toed cats.

He had a small villa looking in the direction of Cuba, which he’d been to—undercover—several times on assignments. Lots of palm trees, lots of rocks decorated his full acre—good sized for the neighborhood. Security was good. Electronics, of course, and a minder he hired from Miami. Rodrigo was a man of loyalty that went beyond compensation for the significant money Foley paid him. He would do little things like stop when on an errand and bring Foley a Cuban coffee and a guava pastry. All on his own.

The little things mattered in his life.

His Savage rifle.

Guava.

The blouses of military uniforms worn by former porn stars doing a damn fine job in a new role.

Beside him, Alisette Lark stirred.

Their liaison had been a mere twenty minutes but that was enough for him.

He had seen her in the uniform. He had thought of her thin, taut legs and round chest, and he had wanted her. Immediately.

But the instant it was over, like when he was married (well, often before it was over) he found himself thinking of the fields, the smell of gunpowder.

The blood.

His rifle.

Lark stretched. He smelled her. All the smells. Had she been satisfied?

It had seemed so. And Lark was not a woman to fake anything—unless it was a role she was playing, in a porn flick or for one of his jobs.

She lit a cigarette, despite the motel’s prohibition—a two-hundred-dollar fine—and she said, “I did what you asked. About coming on to her.”

“The disaster response girl.”

“Her, yeah. Dorion. But I didn’t ask her. I asked her brother about her. Colter. If she was seeing somebody. You were right—from the beginning. He’s the one we have to worry about.”

Which turned his attention to his aching shoulder and nose.

Prick…

Her coming on to the woman, through her brother, was yet another element of the plan, a way to misdirect them. To humanize the woman they thought was Sergeant Tam and to put any suspicions to bed—so to speak.

“I would’ve done it.”

He knew. She did everything he asked. She was making a lot of money. And, besides, he knew she was a switch-hitter. You had to be in the adult film industry.

At the thought of the Shaws—Colter in particular—he felt a sting of anger.

Would there be time to get even?

Maybe. More people would die today. If Shaw was one of them, fine, but Foley was too professional to deviate from one of his plans simply for revenge.

He took the cigarette from her long fingers and drew hard, then handed it back. “Update?”

“The cute little officer thinks that the farmer’s guilty. Her boss, the one playing police chief—”

“The mayor, right?”

“Yeah, Tolifson. He’s a bozo, but it’ll look good for him to get a collar—I think he wants to be chief when this is over with—so he’s drinking the Kool-Aid that Annie’s guilty. Shaw? No, he doesn’t believe it. He’s fucking smart. He might as well be a gold shield. He thinks she’s being set up.”

“Hm.”

When he took on the job, Foley had bolted together a plot that he was pretty sure would work, with a lot of moving parts. But damn elegant, he’d thought. They’d use two explosive charges—first to take the top off the levee and scare the asshole inhabitants out of town. Then Alisette and the fake corporals—from a criminal crew in Oakland—would show up to monitor everything. If it was going according to plan, the second charge would destroy the levee completely, and unleash the flood.

But there had to be a contingent plan—in case the responders learned the levee collapse was not natural.

Which they had.

Thanks to gold-shield Motorcycle Man…

And, apparently, a bunch of fucking honeybees.

The contingent plan was that the mine owner, Gerard Redding, had orchestrated the sabotage to destroy the town to mine lithium. But then the authorities would discover that that was bogus, and Annie Coyne was the real guilty party. She had wanted to ruin Redding and his mine because of some feud between them and because she wanted his allocation of water.

He watched Alisette Lark stub out the cigarette on the top of a soda can and drop the butt in. She stretched and walked into the bathroom. She was completely nude but it was an unselfconscious walk, not surprising for someone who had had sex with probably a thousand men and women over the past decade.

They had met under odd circumstances. She herself had been running a scam to defraud a Boston businessman—some neat plot, involving crypto—when Foley had been on-site coincidentally to shoot the man in the head for some other infraction. He’d waited to kill him until she got her money. Professional courtesy. They started talking and he noted her intelligence and grit and blasé attitude about blood, and unquenchable lust for cash.

He hired her two, three times a year for front work. Sexy and smart. She did her homework. In her gym bag now were a half dozen books she’d devoured for the job, including Flood Plain Management by the University of Minnesota, the U.S. Army Manual of Dams and Waterways and the data sheet on Hydroseal by the manufacturer. The last she’d discovered on her own. That the goo was used on hard surfaces, not dirt like the levee, was a question that woman Dorion Shaw had raised. But, damn, Lark had finessed it, without raising any suspicions.

Now, in this unfortunate motel room, Foley too rose and, not bothering with the shower, dressed fast, reflecting that only two aspects of the job remained.

Destroying the levee with the remaining set of charges.

And the other, his immediate goal: to kill the farmer girl.

She would protest to the police firmly that she wasn’t guilty and she’d probably do a credible job. People might start to believe her, and do some serious investigating.

But if she was killed by the “mercenary” she’d hired, so she couldn’t dime him out?

Well, case closed.