Undeniable Proof

“This may be nothing…but I ran her cell phone. Willa St. Clair made a couple of calls. You want the numbers?”

Landry closed his eyes and let out the breath he’d been holding. “Oh, yeah. I owe you big-time.”

“Yeah, you do.” His friend read off the numbers. One in Naples. The other in South Dakota.

He hung up and tried the Naples one first. An answering machine picked up. She’d called a law firm? He almost hung up but heard something in the recording that caught his attention.

“…if you’ve called about the apartments on Cape Diablo island…”

Cape Diablo? Where the hell was that?

Five minutes later, a Florida map spread across the table in his motel, Landry Jones found Cape Diablo in an area known as Ten Thousand Islands at the end of the road on the Gulf Coast side almost to the tip of Florida.

The only other call Willa St. Clair made had been to South Dakota to probably friends or parents. So he was betting she’d rented one of the apartments on Cape Diablo.

Landry couldn’t believe his luck. The woman was a novice at this. Plus she had no idea about the type of people after her. Or the resources they had at their disposal. She thought she’d found herself the perfect place to hide, did she? Instead, she’d just boxed herself in with no way out.

WILLA PULLED the baseball cap down on her now short curly auburn hair and squinted out across the rough water. The wind blew the tops off the waves in a spray of white mist. Past the bay she could see nothing but a line of green along the horizon.

She glanced at the small fishing boat and the man waiting for her to step in. He called himself Gator, wore flip-flops, colorful Bermuda shorts and a well-worn blue short-sleeved vented fishing shirt. His skin was dark from what he professed had been most of his fifty-some years in the south Florida sun.

“You want to go to the island or not?” he asked, seeming amused by her uncertainty.

“Maybe we should wait until it’s not so rough out there,” she suggested.

He laughed and shook his head. “We wait, the tide will go out and there is no going anywhere until she comes back in. You want to wait until the middle of the night?”

She didn’t, and this time when he held out his hand she passed him the two suitcases and large cardboard box, containing what was most precious to her.

He set everything in the bottom of the boat and reached for her hand. She gave it to him and stepped in. The boat rocked wildly, forcing her to sit down hard on the wooden seat at the front of the boat. “I haven’t been in a lot of boats.”

“No kiddin’,” he said, and started the outboard, flipping it around so the boat nosed backward into the waves.

She grabbed the metal sides and hung on.

“Might want to put on that jacket,” he said as he tucked a tarp around her large cardboard box. “It could get a little wet.”

A slight understatement. A wave slammed over the bow half drowning her in cold spray. She heard a chuckle behind her as she let go to hurriedly pull on the crumpled rain jacket he’d indicated, then drew a life preserver on over that. Both smelled of dead fish, and not for the first time, she wondered if this wasn’t a mistake.

The boat swung around and cut bow first through the waves. Gator gave the motor more power. She gripped the seat under her as the boat rose and fell, jarring her each time it came down. She was glad she hadn’t taken Gator’s advice and eaten something first.

As they started across the bay, she turned to glance back at Chokoloskee, afraid she hadn’t been as careful as she should have.

The wind snapped a flag hanging from the mast of a small sailboat back at the dock. The half-dozen stone crab fishermen she’d seen mending a large net on the dirt near one of the fish shacks were still hard at work. Several of the men had been curious when she’d walked down the dock to talk to Gator, but soon lost interest.

There was no one else on the docks. No new cars parked along the street where she’d hired Gator to take her out to the island. She tried to assure herself that there was no way she’d been followed. But it was hard, given what had happened while she’d been in protective custody.

Landry had found her in what was supposed to be a safe house with two armed policemen guarding her. She’d been lucky to get out alive. From the shots she’d heard behind her, the two men guarding her hadn’t been as lucky. She didn’t kid herself. Landry was after her.

Especially now that she was on her own, unarmed and running for her life. Nor did she doubt that the next time he found her, he’d try to finish what he’d started back at the safe house.

That’s why she couldn’t let him find her. Even if it meant doing something that she now considered just as dangerous.

The green on the horizon grew closer and she saw that it wasn’t one large island but dozens of small ones, all covered in mangrove forests.

Gator steered the boat into what looked more like a narrow ditch, just wide enough for the small fishing boat. As he winded his way through one waterway after another past one island after another, she tried to memorize the route in case she needed to ever take a boat and get to the mainland on her own.

It was impossible. When she looked back, the islands melded together into nothing but what appeared to be an unbroken line of green. She couldn’t even see where the water cut between the islands anymore.

Tamping down her growing panic that she’d jumped from the frying pan into the fire, she told herself she’d picked this island because it was hard to find. She’d wanted remote, and what was more remote than an island in the area known as Ten Thousand Islands along the Gulf side of the southern tip of Florida?

She’d heard about Cape Diablo through another artist she’d met. The woman, a graphic designer named Carrie Bishop, had rented an apartment in an old Spanish villa on the remote island. That’s the last she saw of the artist but she remembered the woman telling her that the area had always been a haven for smugglers, drug runners and anyone who wanted to disappear and never be found.

That would be Willa St. Clair she thought, as watched the horizon, anxious to see what she’d gotten herself into. The rent had been supercheap. The apartment was described as furnished but basic. Not that beggars could be choosers. She was desperate, and that had meant taking desperate measures.

The sun dipped into the Gulf, turning the water’s surface gold and silhouetting the islands ahead and behind her. Willa wondered how much farther it was to Cape Diablo and was about to ask when she felt the boat slow.

She looked up and caught a glimpse of red tile roof. A moment later the house came into view. Instantly she wanted to paint it. A haunting Spanish villa set among the palms.

With relief she saw a pier and beyond it an old two-story boathouse, thankful she would soon be off the rough water and on solid ground again.

Gator eased the boat, stepping out to tie off before he offered her a hand.

The boat wobbled wildly as she climbed out on the pier, making Gator chuckle again. She shot him a warning look, then turned her gaze to the villa.

It was truly breathtaking. Or at least it had been before it had fallen into disrepair. The Spanish-style structure now seemed to be battling back the vegetation growing up around it. Vines grew out of cracks or holes in the walls. Others climbed up the sides, hiding entire sections of the structure.

Palm trees swayed in the breeze and through an archway she could see what appeared to be a courtyard and possibly a swimming pool.

This had been the right decision, she thought, staring at the villa. It gave her the strangest feeling. Almost as if she was supposed to have come here. As if she had been born to paint it. Silly, but she felt as if the house had a story it needed told. That there was much more here than just crumbling walls.

Movement caught her eye. She looked upward and glimpsed someone watching her from a third-floor window.

“You change your mind?” Gator asked from behind her.

She turned to see that he’d put her suitcases on the dock and was sitting in his boat, obviously anxious to leave. Apparently this was as far as he went with her suitcases and box. So much for chivalry.

She turned to look at the villa again. “It’s incredible, isn’t it?”

He grunted.

She’d rented the apartment sight unseen through a phone number she’d called. Her rent had been paid via mail. So she wasn’t surprised there was no one to meet her. She’d been told that the caretaker lived in the boathouse near the pier but that he might not be around. If there was an emergency or any problems, he was the man to see. Her rent money would be picked up each month when a supply boat came. She was told to talk to a man named Bull to order what she needed since there was no phone on the island. No electricity other than a generator. And cell phones didn’t work from the island.

She’d wanted to disappear to someplace isolated—well, she had.

“Last chance,” Gator said.

She shook her head.