Sweetheart by Andrew Coburn Page B

husband. It was not something she could tell him.
    It had been three years ago.
    She was Jane Denig then, a stewardess for Delta. She sat in the passenger seat of a red Porsche in a crowded car park at Miami Airport and watched through the windshield as her boyfriend Charlie dealt with a buyer some twenty yards away. Charlie had no choice. He was in debt, behind in his child support, the mortgage on his condo, and the payments on the Porsche. She had no choice either. She loved him, or thought she did.
    She watched the deal go down while sitting safely in the car. She was unobserved, her face shrouded in shadow as the richness of the Florida evening poured in on her. Money changed hands in an almost priestly way. Cocaine was passed, though with a slight hesitation. Then in a snatch of light she glimpsed the buyer, who was obviously Hispanic, slim, clean-shaven, and very handsome. He seemed to throw Charlie a little kiss before he vanished.
    Charlie scurried back to the Porsche and pushed himself behind the wheel, his face ashen. “Damn it!” he said, trembling and searching for a cigarette he couldn’t find. “He only paid me half what he said he would.”
    “Then why’d you give him the stuff?” she asked.
    “I didn’t want to fool with him,” Charlie said miserably. “I know what he does on the side.”
    She waited for the answer.
    “He kills people.”
    • • •
    Christopher Wade met with Russell Thurston in frail light behind a dark building where scraps of paper, fruit rinds, and flattened soft-drink cans littered the asphalt like fragments from an explosion. Wade, catching the whiff of an alley used as a privy, said, “Couldn’t you have picked a better place?”
    “Call it an adventure.”
    “You want a report?”
    “I already got one. Things went well.” Thurston’s smile was an ironic shadow in his steep face, and his breath smelled of what he’d eaten, which was French food at the Café Plaza. “But tell me, are you really afraid of Gardella?”
    “You bet I am.”
    “As long as it doesn’t make you too cautious. When do you think he’ll make contact?”
    “Soon. Victor Scandura’s been nosing around.”
    Thurston’s breathing quickened. “Gardella will want to take you to dinner, no guinea joint, but someplace nice. He likes to put on airs.”
    “You know his habits.”
    “I know guineas.”
    Wade experienced a quality of feeling he couldn’t explain. Nor did he want to. Having it was bad enough, and watching the glint in Thurston’s eye made it worse. Thurston moved closer.
    “Something’s breaking down in Miami that could have repercussions here. We think it involves Gardella’s money operation, somebody’s greedy fingers. Bodies could fall.”
    Wade said, “You going to let it happen?”
    “How can I stop it? And even if I could, why would I want to? It gives Gardella more to think about and you more of an edge.”
    “That contract on him, he must know about it.”
    “Fits, doesn’t it?” Thurston said and turned sharply. There was static from the alley, a derelict’s gut-rending cough, and they moved quietly to another side of the building, the windows meshed in steel. “You know who owns this building?” Thurston asked and smiled as if from a private joke. Wade looked up and just barely made out the weathered sign that read gardella’s cold storage.
    “Damn you,” Wade said. “This is my life you’re playing with.”
    • • •
    Anthony Gardella closed the door of his library to give him and his sister total privacy. The chairs were leather. His voice was sober. He gave an account of what had happened at G&B Toxic Waste and later at Aceway Development. “I should’ve been called too,” she started to say, but his eyes silenced her. He gave a curt assessment of the situation, no more than she needed to know, and then informed her of happenings in Miami, which caused her to tighten. He spoke without haste, without inflection, almost — it seemed —