Ron Base - Tree Callister 03 - Another Sanibel Sunset Detective by Ron Base Page B

organization, Tree, I should know what you’re up to.”
    “I’m spending most of my time trying to figure you, Cailie.”
    Her smile widened. “I wouldn’t waste my time if I were you. Trying to figure me out will only get you in more trouble than you’re already in.”
    “You haven’t told me if you’re really a cop.”
    “It’ll be on my resume when I apply for a job.”
    He was too tired to argue with her any more. He flopped onto the bed and was vaguely aware of her retrieving the shoulder bag and slipping into the bathroom. Exhaustion washed over him like a series of small blows. He propped his head against luxuriously soft pillows, and was sound asleep.
    ________
    Later—although how much later he could not say other than it was around the time he was being chased by the lion—he was shaken awake. Cailie Fisk’s hair tumbled around her lovely, intense face. Was he dreaming? Hard to say.
    “What is it?” he said.
    Before he could stop her, she dropped her head to him, her lips finding his, savagely kissing him. He pushed her away. “I want you to know,” she said.
    “Stop this, Cailie.”
    “I’m going to destroy you and your wife—just like you destroyed me.”
    She kissed him again, and then she was gone. He tried to sit up and couldn’t. It was a dream. Lions chasing him. Threatening women kissing him.
    Bad dreams, that’s all. If Freddie was here, that’s what she would say.
    He fell back to sleep.

17
    When Tree awoke in the morning, he was alone in the room.
    He had not heard a sound of Cailie leaving, and he still wasn’t sure the kiss, and the threat that went with it, was anything more than a bad dream.
    He got up from the bed, and padded into a tiled bathroom, so white its glare hurt his eyes. He stared at his bleary, unshaven face in the mirror. This morning he not only looked his age, he felt it, too. The muscles along his right arm and shoulder ached. He wanted to go back to bed and forget about everything.
    Instead, he stripped off his clothes and ducked under the hot, reviving spray of the shower. That felt better.
    He found a small bottle of mouthwash in the generous toiletries basket the hotel provided—just in case a guest arrived unexpectedly to spend the night with a mysterious woman who conveniently disappeared the next morning.
    He tried on various scenarios that would explain to Freddie how he twice came to be in the same woman’s hotel room. Even the truth came out like a lie. He inspected the one-day beard growth that on younger men made them look sexy; it made him look like Gabby Hayes—for those who remembered Gabby Hayes.
    After he finished dressing, he decided to call Freddie and let her know he was all right. But not in the space recently shared with Cailie Fisk. He would wait until he was in the lobby. Somehow, anything he said would sound less duplicitous there.
    Riding down in the elevator, Tree thought about how his mother and her sisters used to bring him and his cousins to Sanibel Island each winter. Occasionally, they would break up their stay with an overnight jaunt to Key West. He remembered visiting the Casa Marina, in awe of the grand old hotel built by Henry Flagler to house the very well-to-do arriving from Miami via his newly completed railroad. But Casa Marina had undergone renovation in recent years, and in the process its Old World charm had been lost. Now it was just another anonymously ultra-modern resort hotel.
    In the nearly empty vastness of the lobby, Tree tried to use his phone, but could not get a signal.
    He considered leaving Key West, taking a cab out to the airport and grabbing the first plane back to Miami. He would find a connecting flight to Fort Myers once he got there. But that would mean leaving empty-handed, and no closer to finding Elizabeth Traven than he was when he arrived. Had she really disappeared with ten million dollars? If she had, she wouldn’t still be hanging around Key West.
    Would she?
    She might if Hank