Gamma Blade - Tim Stevens Page 0,4
made of glass, towering above a plush reception area crowded with people who looked to Venn like medical professionals. An intricate ocean-themed mosaic dominated the floor space. Potted palms, beautifully tended, lended a subtle impression of a treasure-laden cave deep in some tropical jungle.
It was the kind of five-star place Venn had visited often enough while pursuing a case, but had never actually stayed at himself.
“Beth!” cried a bespectacled, middle-aged man who was part of a knot of people congregating near the reception desk, and she trotted over to him and hugged him. Venn recognized him vaguely as a doctor at Revere whom he’d met at some social gathering or other back in New York.
He watched Beth chatting with her colleagues, and felt a sense of warm pride and satisfaction wash across him. Three years ago, his life had been on the skids. He’d been a private eye in downtown Manhattan, living from hand to mouth, a veteran of the US Marine Corps and a disgraced cop with his law-enforcement career seemingly a thing of the past. He’d been alone, and jaded, and life had looked pretty damned pointless.
Then Beth came along, and everything had changed. Granted, they’d been thrown together in the most frightening of circumstances, with her on the run from a hired assassin and Venn trying to escape a murder charge for which he’d been set up. They’d had their ups and downs since then, he and Beth, with a short-lived but horrible period of separation last fall when he’d thought he’d lost her forever.
But now here he was, engaged to be married to this beautiful, brainy, feisty girl who was carrying their baby, and who was rocketing ahead in a career she loved. And Venn himself was doing work he got a kick out of, with a bunch of staff he genuinely liked, to a man (and woman).
And he was in Miami for an extended weekend, in a swanky hotel, with the spring sunshine blazing outside and the prospect of a good meal tonight and a lazy day tomorrow, noodling around the city while Beth attended the various talks and seminars at the conference. He’d check out the marina, maybe chat to a couple of the yacht owners about their rigs. Take a browse through a bookstore or two. Buy himself an ice cream and wander down to the beach, dip his toes in the sea.
Life was a four-lane highway stretching to the horizon and beyond, with nothing blocking the way.
Later, after it all happened, Venn would recall how he’d felt at that moment in the hotel lobby. Recall it, and marvel at how things could turn on a dime.
Chapter 3
The guy was a fat, balding grocery store owner named Carlos Fuentes, and the most noteworthy thing about him was the fact that he’d pissed his pants.
Brull stared at the dark stain at the front of the man’s slacks.
He allowed his gaze to linger long enough that Fuentes began to squirm in shame rather than just fear.
Two of Brull’s men, Elon and Pedro, held the guy by his arms. One of them alone could have kept him prisoner, easily. But the presence of two of them ramped up the terror factor.
Ernesto Justice Brull was seated behind his desk in the small office he rented in south Miami. The office was where he conducted a small part of his business, most of his interactions taking place on the street. More importantly, the office served as an address for tax and other legal purposes. It was nominally the premises of the Columbus Employment Agency, a front business which Brull had set up seven years earlier. The agency’s finances were in tip-top shape, every penny of the laundered money that passed through it accounted for, every inch of its neatly furnished quarters meeting the requirements of both Federal and State sanitation and safety legislative diktat.
At last, Brull raised his eyes from the man’s crotch to his face. Fuentes’ eyes were like dull bluish eggs swimming above the pouchy lower lids. The mouth was a wide rictus of terror. Under the weak chin, his throat was speckled with gray stubble, like blackheads on a wino’s nose.
Brull thought: Disgusting.
It was his opinion that a man who didn’t have a beard, yet couldn’t take the trouble to shave in the morning, was as low as a pig.
Brull himself sported a fastidiously groomed mustache and thin jawline strip of beard, with carefully sculpted parallel trails connecting the two. He didn’t like hair much.