Tango key, p.1
Tango Key, page 1
TANGO KEY
T.J. MacGregor
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Print edition originally published under the pen name Alison Drake
© 2012 / T.J. MacGregor
Copy-edited by: Patricia Lee Macomber
Cover Design By: David Dodd
LICENSE NOTES
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Meet the Author
T. J. MacGregor is the author of more than 30 novels and in 2003 won the Edgar Allan Poe award for Out of Sight. She was born at Ballantine Books in 1987, when her editor told her that her maiden name, Trish Janeshutz, was too difficult to pronounce and that mysteries by men were outselling mysteries by women. Could she please come up with a name that had initials? By then, she was married to novelist Rob MacGregor, so she became T.J. MacGregor. A few years later, she wrote Tango Key and by then, mysteries by women were outselling mysteries by men and her editor asked her to create a new female name for that book. So, she became Alison Drake. She's pleased that she can use her T.J. name for the ebook of Tango Key.
She lives in South Florida with her husband, novelist Rob MacGregor, their daughter, Megan, three cats and a noble Golden Retriever.
Book List (currently available or coming soon)
Black Moon
Fevered
High Strangeness
Lagoon
Tango Key
www.trishjmacgregor.com
www.synchrosecrets.com
www.synchrosecrets.com/synchrosecrets
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For Rob and Diane Cleaver
AUTHOR'S NOTE
The Lost City referred to in the story is an actual place, located in the Sierra de Nevada de Santa Marta Mountains in northern Colombia. It was one of 300 interconnected villages inhabited by 700,000 Tairona Indians almost 1,500 years ago. Since the city was discovered in 1976 by a treasure hunter, archaeologists have determined that the Tairona civilization surpassed that of the Incas, Aztecs, or Mayans in city planning and ecology. Although the Tairona were known for their gold work and one of their primary deities was the frog, the legend of the existence of a priceless, gold frog is fictive.
". . . man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites—day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure if one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain."
—Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols
PROLOGUE
July 5, 4:00 P.M.
Light presses against the blindfold like a hot hand, telling her the sun hasn't gone down yet. Eve imagines it striking the window in front of her, exposing the dirt, the accumulation of grime on the glass. She doesn't think the window is open—it can't be, the room is too stifling. Every time she inhales, it's like drawing melted butter into her lungs.
Sweat has made her skin slippery, and when she moves, the ropes that bind her ankles and wrists slide around, rubbing the flesh raw. The gag slices into the corners of her mouth and keeps soaking up the saliva. In the last few hours, her thirst has become a presence; it lives inside her like a virus. She begins to whimper—a low broken sound that is worse than the white burning against her raw skin, the heat, the terrible pressure in her bladder.
She hurls her thoughts away from her like a handful of pennies, up through the roof of this terrible room, out over the island. They scatter. They become birds. They soar into the hot blue sky over the island, looking for whoever will rescue her. Someone will. Someone has to.
She imagines the car, coming to her.
Tango Key is shaped like a cat's head, and the car is traveling swiftly from the main town, Tango, at the south end of the island, roughly where the cat's mouth would be. She can't tell what kind of car it is, but it's looking for her. She's certain of it.
Now it has reached the cat's nose and whiskers, where the hills begin, natural hills, big hills. These hills wouldn't excite people from Colorado, but in a state flatter than anything Columbus imagined, the hills hypnotize. They are magical. Now the car is zipping toward the cat's left ear, where Pirate's Cove is located, the most exclusive development on the island, with its two-million-dollar marina, the rich man's Eden where she has lived for the last two years. Hurry, she screams at the car. Oh please, God, hurry.
The car flies along the Old Post Road toward the cat's right ear. This part of the island is still undeveloped, a moraine of wilderness covered with pine and mango trees, banyans and ficus. There are cliffs here, three of them, and the Old Post Road passes them all.
About a quarter of a mile in from the road, on one cliff, is the old Pleskin place, where she is.
And the car is speeding toward her, she sees it now, oh God, please, in here, she's here. . . . It's gone.
She cries into the gag. How many? How many cars have passed? A dozen? Four dozen? How many have swept past the turnoff for the old farmhouse?
The place looks like a dung heap the weeds are rapidly claiming, the farmhouse and barn so old, so decrepit that a strong wind will topple them. The front windows, covered with blankets, stare out into the yard, as blank and empty as the eyes of a dead bird. Pale lavender periwinkles, growing with wild abandon, poke up through the crumbling sidewalk. Vines climb the sides of the farmhouse. She is in one of the back rooms where the air stinks of mold, dust, a smell like wet shoes, the fetid stench of endings.
Cars whiz past and do not stop. No one stops. No one knows she is here.
A while ago, she tried to scoot her chair closer to the window. She hoped to somehow turn the chair around so she could smash the back of it through the glass. Instead, the chair fell over. Now she lies on her right side, cheek squashed against the dirty floor. If her ankles were tied together instead of lashed to either leg of the chair or if her hands were bound in front of her instead of behind the chair, she might have been able to muster sufficient leverage to get herself upright again. But like this, the chair is an extra limb, a Thalidomide monster that grows from her back and keeps her trapped against the floor, in the dust.
If she can scoot around enough to press her feet against the baseboard, maybe . . . All right. She will try it. She will try anything, because if he finds her like this when he returns, he will think she tried to escape and he will punish her. He will deprive her of water. He won't let her use the bathroom. He will . . .
A violent spasm of fear bites into her spine. Move, do something, try anything. She shifts her shoulder, then her hip, shoulder, hip, her cheek scraping painfully against the floor, dust swirling into her nostrils. Little by little she is moving. But where? Is she inching farther away from the baseboard? Toward the platform where the bare mattress is? Toward the door to the room?
Suppose he finds her halfway across the room or out in the hall? She can hear him saying, Where're you going, babe? Think you're leaving, babe? Don't count on it, babe.
Hysteria flutters in her chest. Tears burn holes in the corners of her eyes. She grunts into the gag, murmurs into it, hums deep in her throat. The noises calm her, reassure her she is still alive. And that's the point: to stay alive. He won't kill her if he finds her like this, on the floor. He won't kill her, because he isn't finished with her yet. He is like a cat. He has hunted her down, and now he will play with her awhile, terrorize her, feed off her terror. Then he will kill her.
Eve stops moving. She tries to root herself in time. It was dark when he brought her here, around four or four-thirty this morning. He forced her mouth open and made her swallow something. It drugged her, whatever it was. When she came to, she was blindfolded, tied on the mattress, but there was light against her face. The sun had risen. She heard the shriek of gulls winging over the farmhouse. The room had been much cooler then. She guesses it is late in the afternoon of the same day. So ten, maybe twelve hours have passed.
Some of her memories are missing. She can't remember, for instance, how she got from the mattress to the chair. And when did she put on this skirt? When did she last eat? She won't think about the memories that aren't there. She'll think about time, about how the minutes and hours have slid into a cubbyhole, about the time . . .
Before I die.
Panic claws at her throat. She can barely breathe. She pulls back into herself, erecting small, brittle walls at the edges of her mind, her heart, her spirit. Because that is really what he wants—the invisible parts of her—to break, remold, to claim. She sinks deeper into the embryonic waters of her own being, sinks until she touches memories of light and color. She floats there like a leaf, then sinks again, the color leaking away, the light darkening as the sediment of the past month eddies around her. That was when i
Now here she is, tied to a chair in the gut of an abandoned farmhouse on a remote part of Tango Key. He will not kill her tonight, maybe he won't kill her tomorrow night or the night after that. But when he is ready, he will kill her much more slowly than he killed her husband.
THE DOPPELGANGER
"Beauty is the promise of happiness."
-STENDAHL
June 7
Aline Scott's Honda sounded like an asthmatic as it wheezed its way up Hurricane Drive.
The car had already overheated once today, when the temperature on Tango Key had peaked at ninety-eight. Although it was dusk now and a few degrees cooler, the Honda was voicing its displeasure. Like Ferdinand the Bull in the old children's story, it just wanted to be put out to pasture to smell the flowers. Unfortunately, the air conditioner in her house apparently had the same idea when it had gone on the fritz this morning. No telling what the heat would kill next—and it was only early June. At this rate, the island would be uninhabitable by August.
In the driveway, the Honda backfired and died. She got out and retrieved her dry cleaning and briefcase from the back seat. There was no breeze. The humidity had clamped down over the island like a dome, and the smell of salt and fish, of jasmine and freshly mown grass, flourished in the utter stillness. The shriek of crickets pulsed against the almost unbearable tightness of the air.
Usually, the sanctity of her house at the end of a day beckoned like a lover. But this wasn't going to be one of those evenings, not without air-conditioning. There was no twenty-four hour repair service on the island, and no one in Key West would make the drive at 8:30 on a Sunday night. So unless Murphy was back from the boat race in Miami and would come over to fix it, she was going to have to sleep out on the porch. Or in the tiny back room with the window air conditioner that rattled like a trunkful of skeletons.
Last summer, Murphy the mechanical wizard had replaced the alternator in her Honda. A couple of months ago he'd fixed the dishwasher, and before that it had been her dryer. In all, in the three years they'd been lovers, he'd rebuilt practically every major appliance in her house.
Her place, like so many homes at the southwest tip of Tango Key, was built on stilts. It rose from the hump of a man-made hill at the dead end of Hurricane Drive, a knotty-pine beach house with vaulted ceilings, a sleeping loft, tile floors, wicker furniture, huge floor-to-ceiling windows. Strictly laid-back.
The house was built shortly after Aline's birth here almost thirty-four years ago. It had been her family's weekend getaway, a refuge from Key West. But when her dad had died in 1978, she'd given up the apartment she'd rented in Key West and had moved in here. It wasn't as large as her old place on Whitehead Street, but it was comfortable—when the air-conditioning worked.
It was an effort to move through the wall of heat in the hall to get to the kitchen. The moment she switched on the light, she heard the sharp click of Wolfe's nails against the pine floors. He appeared in the doorway, a year-old skunk fattened to a tomato plumpness by domestic life. He swished his tail and sniffed at the air, his glossy black fur catching the light, then padded over to Aline and reared up on his hind legs, asking to be picked up. When full-grown, he would be about two feet long, with an eight-inch tail. Right now he was half that. When she'd found him in the jungle of brush and trees behind the house, cowering next to a boulder where his mother had been a predator's entree, he'd been small enough to fit in the palm of her hand.
She had never had him de-scented and wouldn't, as long as he foraged and romped outside. Tango, after all, was home to several panthers, hawks, and other predators. The only time Wolfe had sprayed his malodorous stuff in the house was when Murphy had tripped over him one night en route to the fridge for a midnight snack. Ever since, Murphy had kept a respectful distance—and so had Wolfe.
She nuzzled the top of his head with her chin, then set him down, draped her dry cleaning over the back of a chair, and set her briefcase on the counter. When she opened the fridge, Wolfe lifted his front paws onto the edge of the fruit bin, his little nose busily analyzing the contents. Aline brought out a container of lettuce and some leftover chicken. She shredded the lettuce in his bowl and topped it with bits of chicken. "Skunk-o Delight, guy. Go to it."
She plopped down on one of the stools at the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room, and reached for the phone. Her chest tightened with a now familiar anxiety that said she shouldn't be making this call, not when things between her and Murphy were so unilateral. In fact, the calendar tacked to the bulletin board in front of her said it all.
The slashes that sliced diagonally through the little squares marched back to June 1. That was the last time Aline had seen him outside of work—and only because she had called and invited him to dinner. Before that, the slashes dated to May 25, a free Saturday when they'd both worked their other jobs—Murphy at the old boatyard here at the south end of the island, and Aline in her bookstore. He'd come into Whitman's at the end of the day to pick up a couple of books he'd ordered and they'd gone out to dinner and a movie. She traced the slashes back farther still, to May 1, the last time he had gotten in touch with her. The tiny red L in the corner of the square indicated they'd also made love that night. The only other L that appeared in the five-week period from May 1 to June 7 was on May 25. Her initiative. It had been quick and perfunctory. It didn't take a mathematician to figure out the odds on this one, she thought, and pushed the phone away.
Things might've been easier if they didn't work together, if she didn't see him every day. It wasn't as bad during the season, when the staff of the Tango Key police department doubled. But since late April, when the number of tourists had tapered off and their full-time staff had been cut back to twelve, she couldn't step out of her office without running into him.
She climbed the bamboo ladder to her sleeping loft. Both windows were wide open and the ceiling fan was on, but the air felt scorched. Clean laundry, which had probably molded by now from the heat, was heaped on the bed, as were books and magazines she'd weeded out of the straw basket near the window and hadn't tossed out yet. Aline rarely slept in the bed anymore, opting instead for the colorful hammock strung up in front of the window. Her solitude there seemed less noticeable when she awakened in the middle of the night.
She paused in front of the bureau, regarding herself in the mirror, searching for evidence that might explain Murphy's diminishing ardor. In February she would be thirty-four to his thirty-six, so it couldn't be her age he objected to. Her wavy cinnamon-colored hair, which fell past her shoulders and was woven into a single braid tonight, had no gray in it. Her eyes, a vibrant blue fringed in lashes a shade lighter than her hair, weren't deeply lined at the corners. Her nose was merely ordinary, straight and narrow, rather sparse. Her mouth was okay, a shade too large for the rest of her face, but hey, she had great teeth. At five eight in her bare feet, she was slender but not skinny, with adequate curves. She was attractive, she thought dispassionately, but not stunning, not a knockout like Monica, Murphy's wife, had been.
Okay, so maybe it didn't have anything to do with the way she looked. Then what? Did she have bad breath? Laugh at stupid jokes? Should she dress more seductively? Try a new perfume? Had their sex life gotten routine? What sex life?
Her housekeeping: she turned and looked slowly around the loft, trying to see it through Murphy's eyes. She definitely failed in the domestic department. Her house was cluttered—not unclean, just cluttered—and she wasn't even an adequate cook. But they'd known each other for almost ten years, she and Murphy, so none of this was new to him. Aline had actually met his wife first, at a book fair in Key West shortly after Murphy had started working in Tango's homicide department. After Monica's murder, Aline, the grieving closest friend, and Murphy, the devastated husband, had drawn comfort from each other that eventually had become something else.
