Busted!, page 2
part #16 of Cherry Delight Series
If he was right, there was plenty of loot for three people. Did he, Rod McCarty, want to go in as a partner?
Rod did. He had saved up some money, enough to buy gear they might need—the Henrys already owned The Sea Jade, which was seaworthy enough, if old—and he put that money at the disposal of the partnership.
Pete had invited him to come aboard the Jade and meet his wife.
Jill had been wearing a bikini then, too. The bra had scarcely been able to hold in her breasts; he had seen a lot of those pale globes with the blue veins, and had caught a glimpse of pubic hair where the crotch-piece of the bikini had failed to cover her.
She hadn’t minded. Her brown eyes had laughed at him; she enjoyed his admiration and his sudden yen for her flesh. Pete hadn’t noticed anything. He was just glad they seemed to hit it off so well.
From that moment on, she had been a torture to him. Not that she went out of her way to be seductive. All she had to do was be there, in a bikini or one of those skimpy play-suits that fitted her like a second skin. He had occasionally touched her, when Pete wasn’t around. Just testing, so to speak. And she hadn’t minded; she loved it.
Now he had her under his bucking hips, sobbing like a demented thing. He couldn’t get enough of her. He had been hunting a woman like this for all his life. Now he had her where he wanted her to be, and he was never going to let her go.
No matter what happened.
She arched upward, beating against his belly with her own. Her legs tightened, tightened. He felt her interior muscles gripping him like a smooth, moist hand. Those muscles milked him, milked him. He had known about this, but he had never experienced its pleasure.
He gave a deep bellow, into which her scream of ecstasy blended.
They clung like that, quivering for long moments, until Rod pulled free and rolled over on his back, staring blindly at the ceiling. Jill lay beside him, murmuring unintelligible words, hot and sweaty.
Her hand fumbled for his chest, ran over it as she turned on a side to smile at him.
“Rest,” she whispered. “Then I’m going to feed you. We have two or three days, all to ourselves, before Pete gets back.”
“It won’t be enough. We’ve got to find ways to meet even when Pete is here.”
“I know. We—”
That was when the bullet shattered the porthole glass and dug deep into the cabin bulkhead.
CHAPTER ONE
He was a big man, I saw as I came into the office where Avery King sat behind a big modernistic desk and watched me watching the stranger. His hair was golden and cut short, almost in a crew. His body was strong, very muscular, and he was tall.
He unfolded himself from the easy chair even as his blue eyes ran up and down my body. They showed appreciation for my legs, my hips enmeshed in a plaid skirt, and for my breasts under the beige sweater.
Avery King said, “Pete Henry, Cherry.”
I smiled and held out a hand to be shaken. His blue eyes glowed down at me. Then I glanced at my Coordinator for the New York Mafia Prosecution and Harassment Organization, arching my eyebrows.
“Pete’s up from Florida for help,” Avery King said softly. “He’s found some Spanish treasure, and he thinks the Family wants to take it away from him.”
I looked at Pete Henry with more interest. “Must be a lot of treasure if the Mafia’s interested. They don’t go in for two-bit stuff.”
“It’s a lot.”
“How much a lot?”
“Ten million. Maybe fifty million. I don’t know. I can’t tell. We’ve barely begun our diving.”
“You and who else?”
“My wife Jill and my partner Rod McCarty.”
Avery King cleared his throat. He lifted a file before him and shook it at me. “He’s telling the truth, Cherry. I have a report from a museum curator who saw some of the objects he brought up. They’re real and they’re historically priceless.”
He smiled faintly. “Not only that, but there’s a metallurgist’s report, as well. They’re real gold and real silver. Big bars of them. Ingots, really. Pure gold, pure silver.”
“Hey, wow!”
Pete Henry smiled at me. “Here, take a look at this.”
His hand dipped into his pocket, brought out a big thing that looked like a diamond. It was the size of a walnut.
My eyelids blinked at it.
Pete said, “It’s a diamond; it isn’t paste.”
My hand grabbed for it. I knew diamonds—any smart girl does—and so I studied it carefully. It was of that clear color they call blue. It gave off colors when I held it to the sunlight.
After a time, I found my voice. “You got this from a sunken ship?”
“That, and a lot of others. I brought that one to show Mr. King. The others are in a safe deposit box in Miami Beach.”
I stared at him. “You must be about as rich as God. No wonder the Mafia is so interested.”
“Well, that’s why I’m here. They made a couple of attacks on me and my partner, also my wife. I fought them off, but I know damn well I can’t keep on doing it. I need help. I’ve heard of your organization, so I figured I’d better come north and see you people.”
My Coordinator said, “Feel like a trip to Florida, Cherry?”
“Do I ever!”
Pete Henry looked startled. “Hey, now. You’re not sending her down there. A girl?”
“What are you, some kind of male chauvinist pig?”
He seemed to flush a little under his tan. “Hey, now, of course not.”
I couldn’t get angry at him; he seemed to be in so much inner distress. I passed it off with a laugh, saying, “You remind me about that story where the man comes to the Texas Rangers about a riot, and when the boss-man assigned one Ranger to go back with him, the man protested about getting only one Ranger. ‘You only have one riot, don’t you?’ the boss-man asked him. Well, you only have one part of the Family, right?”
The blue eyes looked at me steadily. Then he swung around on Avery King. “Are you really serious about this, or are you putting me on?”
Avery King smiled. “Let me tell you something about this girl, Cherry Delight. There was the time she went to Red China to get some Mafia hit men. She had quite an adventure in Italy with a man named Silverfinger. I’d say she’s killed about two hundred Mafia buttons, give or take a couple.”
He went on to talk about my cases over the past couple of years. Pete Henry sat there bug-eyed, hardly breathing. Every once in a while he would turn to stare at me, awe in his blue eyes.
When my boss-man was done, he croaked, “She’s really that good, is she?”
I swooned when Avery King said, “She is. She’s even better than I’ve made her out to be.”
This was high praise indeed, coming from the Coordinator. I wondered if I ought to hit him for a raise, but I was already making damned good money, so I figured he wouldn’t take kindly to the idea.
“Cherry has a further advantage, as you’ve already noticed,” King chuckled.
“Oh? What’s that?”
“Like yourself, nobody ever thinks she’s as deadly as she is. You didn’t. All you see is a sexpot, right?”
Pete grinned. “Well, I did notice a few things.”
I smiled at him sweetly. I crossed my legs high up to let him see the shape of my thighs.
“The Mafia boys see her the same way you do—until she goes into action.”
Pete nodded as though he’d just made up his mind. “All right. If she’s as good as you say she is, I’m satisfied. How soon can she join me?”
“When are you leaving?” I asked.
He glanced at his wristwatch. “I was hoping to make the plane from LaGuardia first thing in the morning, the ten o’clock flight.”
“I can be ready in an hour,” I told him.
“An hour?”
“Why wait? We can make a flight from Kennedy in the late afternoon, be down at Miami by dark, get a good night’s sleep, and be ready for action first thing tomorrow morning.” I sighed. “I won’t mind swimming off that Florida coast, I’ll tell you that. Be a bit of a vacation for me, before I go into action.”
Pete nodded his head. “The next flight from Kennedy then. I’ll pick up my things and meet you at the airport.”
“Correction. You’ll pick up your things, meet me at my place.” I reached for a piece of paper on the boss’s desk and wrote out my address. I glanced at him. “You eaten lunch yet? If you haven’t, I make a wicked club sandwich.”
“All this and Heaven too,” Pete laughed.
We went out of the office side by side, like old pals, parting on the sidewalk where we each grabbed taxis.
I keep a bag packed, usually, in between assignments. Since summer was almost on us, it was filled with beach robes, bikinis and the like. Just the thing for Florida. Of course, if I’d had to go to the North Pole, say, I’d have had to repack the Tourister. As it was, I just added a few things, then filled another bag with an evening gown or two, plus a few street dresses. I figured that if I were going to hang around a boat, I wouldn’t need good things, but if I got invited to a party or two, I wanted to be ready.
I had just taken off my clothes when the doorbell rang. I stared down at my naked body. I really shouldn’t answer the ring like this, I told myself, so I reached for a pair of black nylon and lace panties with a cut-open crotch that hugged my hips like loving hands as I slithered into them.
Pausing to stare at my mirrored reflection, I decided that this might be a little much. So as the door chimes caroled a second time, I snatched up a transparent robe (fashioned from sheer gauze) and trotted toward the door.
Pete Henry gulped three times as his blue eyes took me in. I was a melody in black, white and red.
“Hey, you’re early,” I laughed, stepping back.
He teetered there, muttering, “I could come back.”
“Nonsense, nonsense! You’ll see me in a bikini in Florida, so why not the preview?”
Of course, no bikini was as revealing as this, but I felt that was beside the point. I grabbed his wrist and yanked him forward.
He was blushing. Imagine that!
I turned and walked away, gesturing at my portable bar. “Make yourself a drink, I have the equipment for almost any kind you can think of. I won’t be a sec.”
He was still staring at me as I closed my bedroom door. The poor guy looked as if he hadn’t seen as much of a woman since he’d been born. I wondered about his married life. He had said he was married, hadn’t he? Yes, he had. What kind of a wife did he have, anyhow? Or maybe he just liked variety.
It didn’t take long to slide out of the sheer robe and slip an A-line dress over my girl-girl curves.
Pete had a double old fashioned in his hand as I emerged. He also had a relieved look on his face. I came up to him, eyebrows raised.
“You sure you’re going to be able to drive after that?”
He peered down into his glass. “Don’t see why not.” He gave me an engaging grin. “I needed it.”
I moved to the bar, made a martini over rocks for myself. I murmured, “You did say you’re married, right? Thought so.”
He felt impelled to defend his marriage. “Jill and I—well, we don’t hit it off too well. Nobody’s fault, you understand. Just a little tired of each other.”
I wondered what his wife was like. She sounded as though she was a cold dish. I studied this big man and began to wonder. Maybe he was sexually deficient. Some men are. He didn’t look it, though.
Still! This had nothing to do with the case.
“Tell me what happened between you and the Mafia,” I urged. “I’m going in to make us some club sandwiches in a few minutes, but before I do, I’d like to know the lay of the land.”
“What’s to tell? A few days, maybe a week after we made our find, some men came out of the shadows at Rod and me. We fought them off. Rod’s a big guy and just as muscular as I am, but that wasn’t the end of it. Next day we got a letter in the mail, telling us to pull up anchor and leave the plate fleet. Or what happened the night before would happen again. Only next time the hoods would have brass knuckles and there would be twice as many of them.
“I went to the cops, got protection for a few days. But the police couldn’t stay with us forever. They left and when they did—it was as if the Mafia boys were keeping their eyes on us, as I guess they were—somebody took a pot shot at Jill. Almost got her.”
I was sitting on the divan with my nyloned legs crossed. I nodded. “Scare tactics. The Family uses them at first, figuring there’s no sense in killing if they can get what they want a better way.”
He sipped his drink, trying not to look at my legs. “I guess so. Anyhow, we began to see a boat, a sleek cabin cruiser, near where we were diving. It didn’t attack us, nothing like that, but we could see the glint of sunlight on binoculars as they kept watching us all the time.”
Pete smiled wryly. “I guess they saw us bring up some gold ingots at some time or other, they were too far away for us to claim interference, you understand, but they were near enough for those high-powered field glasses to study our every move.”
He finished his drink, turned the glass around in his long fingers as if he were debating about having another, then put it down on the bar.
“As I say, they must have seen those gold ingots, because the next night they came aboard our boat as we docked late at night. They were waiting for us; they knew that we were at sea beyond our normal period.”
He paused and rubbed his jaw.
“That was a real battle, that one. Jill even got in on it, with a crowbar. We beat them off, but Rod and I were pretty well battered. We decided to rest up for a couple of days, and that was when I had the idea of coming north to see your boss.”
I smiled at him as I set down my own drink and rose to my feet. “Better get some food into you,” I announced. “Come in the kitchen and watch me work.”
I fried bacon and sliced tomatoes and some cold chicken I had in the fridge while I put him to making toast. There’s nothing like a homey atmosphere to make a male think he’s really getting to know you. I wanted Pete to feel that because I wanted to get to know him better, too.
He enjoyed my company, like doing the little chores I tossed at him. I could see it in his eyes. He was almost like a big, friendly puppy dog.
While we were eating, he said, shaking his head, “I still can’t get over the fact that you’re a girl and a N.Y.M.P.H.O. agent. It just doesn’t seem right.”
“You’ll learn, in time. Oh, by the way. While I’m in Florida, I won’t be staying with you. I’m going to a motel, and the reason for that is this.”
“Operating on my own as I do, I don’t want to be in anybody’s way. I especially don’t want anybody to be in my way. I need freedom to move around, to do what has to be done, if I decide on it.”
I stared hard at him. “How’d the Mafia learn about your treasure, anyhow?”
He looked surprised. “I don’t know. What difference does it make?”
“Maybe no difference. What I’m getting at is, how well do you trust this Rod McCarty?”
Pete stared at me, then threw back his head and laughed. When he quieted down, he said, “I trust Rod with my wife. You’re hinting that he may have blabbed to the Mafia. No way.”
“Maybe you’re right. If he were with the Family, they’d have wiped you out ages ago. And Jill?”
Pete smiled trustingly. “She’s my wife.”
“Okay, okay. I had to ask.”
We ate some more, then he said, “Sometimes we stay out at sea for a couple of days and nights. Easier to be on the job next morning. I figured you’d be with us then.”
“And I will. It’s only on land that I need that freedom to come and go. Fair enough?”
He nodded. “I know a damn nice motel about a mile from our place.” Pete frowned. “It’s expensive.”
“Never mind the expense. I bill everything to N.Y.M.P.H.O. when my job is done. A mile away? That ought to be just about right.”
We finished our meal and the coffee I’d perked, then Pete helped me pile the dishes in the sink. They’d be taken care of by the lady who comes in to clean up my place every so often. Frankly, I’m not much on housework.
He carried my bags downstairs and put them in the trunk of his rented car, alongside his own. Then we drove off to Kennedy airport through the late afternoon traffic with hardly a word between us.
N.Y.M.P.H.O. had arranged to have our tickets waiting for us. We walked straight through to the boarding gate and through a covered passageway into the plane itself. We found our seats without trouble.
The flight was smooth, easy. No problem.
When we put down wheels over Miami’s airport in the early dusk of evening, I stared from the window to see the lights go on like strings of lamps laid out in surrealistic patterns. Everyone about us was sitting clamped in seat-belts Even the stewardesses were seated.
The plane started its dip earthward. The motors hummed, the jet slipped lower, lower, as though dropping foot by foot. By peering sideways from the window, I saw the flares along either side of the runway. The plane dropped some more.
Tires caught with a screech of rubber. The motors roared now and the brakes took hold. We slowed our headlong run, and I heard a sigh or two of relief from two women directly behind us.
The rest of our trip was routine. We disembarked and moved with our fellow passengers to the terminal. Then we scattered in all directions. Pete Henry had left his car in a parking lot, we headed for it.
As we did, I saw out of the corners of my eyes that two men who had been lounging under the terminal overhang turned their heads and stared at us. They were dark men in fancy sports shirts and slacks. They looked like tourists.
They were Mafia.
At least, this is what my female intuition told me, and that intuition had been honed by years of recognizing members of the Family. I didn’t break stride, I didn’t betray by so much as the flicker of an eyelash that I was at all perturbed.
