It had been a hot, sweet, exceptionally pleasurable three weeks and they’d parted friends, but with no plans to reconnect in the future. With the kind of life he led, that was for the best. Disappearing for months at a time while undercover didn’t create a foundation for an enduring relationship. And he loved his job far too much to consider giving it up, at least not for a few more years.
“Another thing to look out for,” Drew said. “I’ve heard that electronics go kind of wacky around there.”
Colton thumped his GPS screen, which alternated between showing a moving dot and blacking out every other second. “Yeah, I see that.”
“Cell phones are especially unreliable out there. Except maybe in a few choice spots. You might not be able to get a call out for backup if something goes wrong. Keep that in mind before jumping into anything. When you check back in with me, you’ll probably have to head outside Mystic Glades to do it.”
“Understood.” He drove around another curve and then pulled to a stop. Directly in front of him on an archway over the road was an alligator-shaped sign announcing the entrance to Mystic Glades.
He inched forward, then stopped again just beneath the archway, blinking at what seemed like a mirage. “You’re not going to believe this,” he said into the phone. “Mystic Glades looks like someone took an 1800s spaghetti Western town and plopped it right into the middle of the Everglades. I’m at the end of a long dirt-and-gravel road with a line of wooden buildings on either side. Instead of sidewalks, they’ve got honest-to-goodness boardwalks out front. Like in horse-and-buggy days.”
The phone remained silent. Colton pulled it away and looked at the screen. No bars. No signal. The call had been dropped. Great. He put the phone away and checked the GPS. That screen was dark now, too. Useless, just as Drew had warned.
He debated his next move. Going in blind didn’t appeal to him, with no way to let his boss know if he needed help. But working undercover often put him in situations where he couldn’t call for days or even weeks at a time. So this wasn’t exactly new territory. Plus, the kid he was after was just a few days past his eighteenth birthday and still had the lanky, gangly body of a teenager. Physically, he wasn’t a threat to Colton’s six-foot-three frame, and probably had half his muscle mass, if that. But if Colton discovered the other members in the burglary ring out here—and their leader—he could be at a huge disadvantage by sheer numbers alone, not to mention whatever firepower the group had.
His undercover persona so far hadn’t managed to get him inside the ring, but he’d been living on the streets in Naples where most of the burglaries had occurred, developing contacts. And he’d heard enough through those contacts, along with his team’s detective work back at the station, to put the burglary ring at around fifteen strong, possibly more. He even knew the identities of a handful of them. But without being sure who their leader was, and having evidence to use against him, Colton needed some kind of key to break the case open. Right now that key appeared to be the group’s weakest link, Eddie Rafferty. A small fish in the big pond, Eddie would be the perfect bait to draw the others out. But to use him as bait, first Colton had to catch him.
Even though he didn’t see the rust-bucket Caddy anywhere, he might have caught the break he needed. Because little Eddie Rafferty had just stepped out of a business called Callahan’s Watering Hole and was sauntering toward the far end of the street.
Time to go fishing.
Silver stood in the front yard, shading her eyes from the sun as she faced the whitewashed two-story—her pride and joy, the first bed-and-breakfast ever to grace Mystic Glades. Thanks to the recent success of Buddy Johnson’s airboat venture that was bringing in tourists and the dollars that went with them, all but one of her eight bedrooms was booked for the next three months, starting tomorrow, opening day.
Bright and early, Tippy Davis and her boyfriend, Bobby Jenks, would be here to help Silver after Buddy’s airboats brought the B and B’s first guests. Everything was ready—except for attaching the large sign to the part of the roof that jutted out over the covered front porch with its gleaming white railings.
“A tad to the left, Danny,” she called out to one of the two men on ladders beside the front steps, holding either end of the creamy yellow, bed-shaped sign that announced Sweet Dreams Bed & Breakfast, proprietor Silver Westbrook.
“Looks perfect where it is, if you ask me.”
She smiled at skinny Eddie Rafferty, who’d just walked up. The beat-up junker that he was so proud of was nowhere to be seen. Since he lived several miles away, deep in the Glades, she figured maybe he’d parked his car in the lot behind the building next door, Mystic Glades’s answer to Walmart, Bubba’s Take or Trade.
“You think it’s centered?” she asked.
“Yep.”
“Stop right there,” she called out. “Eddie said the sign’s perfect.”
Danny gave them both a thumbs-up, and the sound of hammers soon shattered the early-morning quiet. Snowy egrets flushed from a nearby copse of trees and the razor-sharp palmetto bushes that separated her little piece of town from Bubba’s and the rest of the Main Street businesses. On the other side of her B and B, more trees and lush, perpetually wet undergrowth formed a thick barrier between the inn and Last Chance Church. Beyond that, there was only the new airboat dock and the swamp with its ribbons of lily-pad-clogged canals.
She loved the illusion of privacy and serenity that the greenery provided, along with the natural beauty that her artist’s soul craved. Being this close to nature, instead of seeing concrete and steel skyscrapers out her attic-bedroom window every day, was one of the reasons she’d returned to her hometown after being gone for so many years. But not the only reason.
“You’re right, Eddie. It’s perfect. You have a good eye.”
He flushed a light red and awkwardly cleared his throat. It practically broke Silver’s heart knowing how much her compliments meant to Eddie. He was like a stray cat. Once offered a meal or, in her case, friendship and encouragement, he’d made a regular habit of making excuses to visit her.
Unlike a stray, he wasn’t homeless. But since he’d turned eighteen a few weeks ago and was technically an adult, he would be homeless soon. His foster parents, Tony and Elisa Jones, were anxious for him to move out so they could put another foster kid in his bedroom and continue to receive their monthly stipend from the state. Eddie was supposed to be looking for a job every day in Naples, but Silver suspected he was up to something else entirely. Probably hanging out with the wrong crowd, like Ron Dukes or Charlie Tate, the two little hoodlums she blamed for half the trouble that Eddie got into.
In spite of their friendship, Silver didn’t know all that much about him except that, unlike her, he hadn’t grown up here. She knew he didn’t have any blood relatives. But whenever she’d tried to get him to open up about his past, he would shut down and disappear for days. So she’d stopped asking.
Town gossip, assuming it could be trusted, said that Eddie had spent over half his life in the foster system. And for some reason, even though there had been interest off and on, no one had ever adopted him.
It was a chicken-and-egg kind of thing. Did he continually get into trouble because he didn’t have a family, or did he not have a family because he kept getting into trouble? Either way, he was too young to be thrown away like a piece of garbage. He had potential, and she fervently hoped he would turn his life around one day, before it was too late.
Danny Thompson and his friend exchanged a wave with her as they folded their ladders and headed back to Callahan’s. Buddy was probably champing at the bit for Danny’s return. The morning airboat tours couldn’t start without him to pilot one of the three boats. But Danny had insisted there was plenty of time to help her hang the sign before the boats were due to push off. After all, the tourists were enjoying the “free” breakfast portion of the tour package right now