Agnes and the Hitman Read online

  “So today we sink my mother’s boat,” Lisa Livia said.

  “I really don’t have time.” Agnes put more cakes on the griddle for her. “I have to decorate a wedding cake and a groom’s cake because your rattlesnake of a mother did something to the baker, remember? There’s a wedding tomorrow.”

  “Oh, right.” Lisa Livia sat down in Carpenter’s chair. “Maria’s bridesmaids come in today, don’t they?”

  “Bachelorette party is upstairs on the second floor, which is also where they’re staying tonight. Bachelor party in the barn.” Agnes watched the pancakes bubble. “Taylor talked Palmer into it so he could get the money for renting it twice. Rehearsal dinner first Joey’s taken over the catering, so that’s something, and Kristy just called and said she’ll be here tonight to take the pictures, and Butch swears he’ll get Cerise and Hot Pink out of here as soon as he gets his work done at the zoo and can sneak a truck out. This afternoon, I have to get the bows on the gazebo, but Garth is a fast learner so he can help, and most of the real prep will be early tomorrow morning. The rental stuff’s all here, so that’s not a worry. Really, as long as Maisie gets her daisies here and I get the cakes done and Joey gets the catering done…” She felt her stomach cramp as she thought about all the ifs between now and the wedding. “… we’ll be fine. Plus, you know, my column.” My career. Mother of God, I have to get my priorities straight. Once I figure them out.

  “I believe you.” Lisa Livia picked up Carpenter’s fork and began to finish off his breakfast. “My plan for today is just to get the mildew off Venus, so I have time to help with whatever you need. When do you plan to switch out the flamingo theme for the daisies-and-butterflies theme?”

  “I don’t know.” Agnes flipped the cakes. “I’m trying to take my cue from Maria because she doesn’t want to upset Evie after all the good flamingo work she’s done, but-”

  Lisa Livia’s cell phone rang, and she pulled it out and answered it. Her face went rigid while she listened. “What? I can’t be-” She listened again. “Give me your number.” She held out her hand and Agnes grabbed a pencil and her To Do List off the counter and handed it to her and she wrote a phone number down. “I’ll call you back.” She hung up, sheet white, and said, “Where’s your laptop?”

  Agnes pointed to the end of the counter and LL went and got it. “Internet?”

  “Wireless,” Agnes said. “Through the phone lines. What-” Lisa Livia shook her head, her breath coming faster, and began to hit the keyboard, typing fast She stopped and looked at the screen and said, “No,” and then typed again and looked at the screen and said, “No,” and typed again, and Agnes came around to see what she was doing.

  Bank accounts. One after another until it looked like there were ten open windows on the screen. “Jesus fucking Christ,” Lisa Livia said under her breath.

  “LL?”

  “She look it all,” Lisa Livia said, her breathing short and shallow. “All what?”

  Lisa Livia shook her head and Agnes looked at her and said, “Put your head between your legs. Now,” and forced her head down, just as LL started to slide.

  “Brenda took your money,” Agnes said, her hand on LL’s neck, keeping her head down until she got some blood back in her brain.

  “Not just mine.” LL’s voice was muffled. “Let me up.”

  Agnes stepped back and Lisa Livia straightened, some color in her face.

  “She must have gone onto my laptop,” Lisa Livia said. “When I was staying on that fucking boat, while I was asleep or out here, she used my laptop and somehow she figured out my password. She didn’t just take everything I own, she looted the accounts I manage for my clients. She did it because I was working with you, fighting her on this house. Because I said you were family, not her. She cried all over me that night about that. I told her she should have thought ahead before she killed my daddy.” She nodded at the laptop. “This is her payback.”

  “Oh, God,” Agnes said, and sat down hard. “How much?”

  Lisa Livia swallowed hard. “I’ll have to…” She drew a deep breath. “In a minute when I can do this without passing out, I’ll add it up. But somewhere around eight or nine hundred thousand.”

  “Dollars?” Agnes swallowed hard, too. “We’ll get it back. We’ll go out to that damn boat and-”

  Lisa Livia closed her eyes. “She’ll have it in the Caymans by now. I can’t even kill her to get it, that bastard Taylor will inherit.”

  “Jesus,” Agnes said. “Can’t we go ransack the boat and find the numbers or something?”

  “She’ll have them hidden in one of the millions of places the Real Estate King had built into that damn thing. I wouldn’t even know how to look for them.” She shook her head, keeping her jaw set, fighting tears. “Pretty ironic. I spend my whole life working, neglect my kid to build up this safety net for us, and then because I want to be there for her at her wedding, I lose everything, including my future. And then I screw up her wedding by sticking her with flamingos.”

  “Lisa Livia, it’s not-”

  “I am such a fuckup.”

  “No, you are not.” Agnes put her arm around her. “You don’t even believe that. I have no idea how to fix this, but we will. We’ll get your money back. We’ll do your daughter’s wedding, then we’ll sink your mother’s boat, and then we will get your money, Shane and Carpenter and I, we’ll help you get it back. I swear to you, we will.”

  Lisa Livia looked at her. “You don’t even know how to sink a boat”

  “I am learning many new skills this week,” Agnes said. “Eat your pancakes.”

  To Do List, she thought. Throw Maria’s wedding. Return stolen flamingos. Clean up the Venus. Get Lisa Livia’s money back. Kill somebody named Casey Dean. She looked out the window to the dock where Shane and Carpenter were conferring with their boss. Sink Brenda’s boat. Write my goddamn column. Believe in Shane when he tells me what I’m dying to hear.

  She went to the pantry to get the wedding cakes.

  “I didn’t explain things to Agnes very well,” Shane said when they’d started down the path to the dock.

  “You have to speak from the heart,” Carpenter said.

  “The heart.”

  “Yes. You have to open up to the world and learn optimism, and the words will come to you, and you’ll tell Agnes how you feel.” Shane stopped. “What?”

  Carpenter looked at him, serene. “Contentment with the past, happiness with the present, and hope for the future. Learned optimism.”

  “Oh.” Shane frowned. “I told her I wanted to come back here. She seemed pretty happy.”

  Carpenter nodded. “That’s a start. Once you open yourself to the world, my friend, good things will come to you.”

  “I don’t think going to meet Wilson is the best time for me to get optimistic and, uh, open my heart.”

  “Indeed not. In some ways, your heart opening up is causing a lot of trouble and, I believe, precipitating this meeting.”

  He nodded down the dock to where Wilson was already sitting on one of the benches, dressed impeccably in his suit. Shane felt like he was walking the gangplank as they made their way down the long dock to him. Brenda’s yacht bobbed on the water, but there was a sleeker, much newer and larger boat just off the low dock: Wilson’s mode of transportation. A dark figure was on the bridge of the boat running the engines, keeping it in place against the tide. The jet boat Carpenter had driven the last time Shane met Wilson was tied down on the front deck next to a small crane.

  “I’m disappointed,” Wilson said as they arrived at the high dock.

  Cerise and Hot Pink chorused their disapproval, too.

  Without being asked, Shane sat down across from his boss while Carpenter took a seat beside him.

  Wilson looked at Shane, his eyes as sharp as ever. “You’ve had two opportunities to take out Casey Dean, and not only have you failed in both, you have allowed Don Fortunato’s consigliere to complete down payment for the contract.”