Crystal Blue (Buck Reilly Adventure Series Book 3), John Cunningham [top fiction books of all time TXT] 📗

bellman who’d helped defuse the attack next to him. A moment later two policeman appeared in front of us.

“Someone tried to steal my suitcase.” Crystal spoke up before a question was even asked. “Thank God Buck arrived at the same time.”

The cops looked at me.

“Buck Reilly?” the shorter, pudgier one said. It came off like an accusation.

One cop took a statement from Crystal while the other took one from me. I followed her lead and made the attack seem like a robbery gone awry. I told him about the knife and the bellman coming in the nick of time, which caused Slicked-back to run. No, I didn’t notice the make of the van or license plate. In twenty minutes they were finished and said they’d let us know if they learned anything. Crystal gave her cell number. I told them I could be reached at the La Concha.

The manager was still apologizing when we climbed aboard the Rover, now an hour behind schedule.

“Sure you still want to do this charter, Buck?” She looked straight through the windshield.

I shifted gears and we made our way down Atlantic Boulevard to A1A. One of my former partner Jack Dodson’s sayings came to mind: A job that starts bad ends bad.

I swallowed.

“A paid trip to the Virgin Islands, are you kidding?”

I caught the hint of a smile out of the corner of my eye.

And wished I didn’t know from experience that Jack’s sayings almost always came true.

WE TOOK OFF FIFTEEN minutes after arriving at Key West International Airport, leaving Ray with his mouth agape after I told him Crystal’s husband was missing and she’d just been attacked at the Casa.

It took nearly an hour of coaxing before Crystal opened up.

“This had always been John’s dream—the charity, the celebrities, the promotional events—believe me, I had my fill of Hollywood while living there. I went along with it, thinking he’d never pull it off, but I admired his passion.” She sighed. “I’ve learned that when John puts his mind to something, it’s going to happen.”

“Why adoption?”

She looked out the window, watching the water shimmer from 15,000 feet up as she talked.

“It’s funny,” she said. “I knew people who’d adopted babies, mostly from abroad, but I just never had any thoughts about it one way or the other. Then, when… one of my… college girlfriends got pregnant, it was an absolute given that she HAD to have an abortion. Sure, she fantasized about having her baby, but there were just no support systems, not to mention the culture of shame that surrounds an unwanted pregnancy—even pro-lifers sometime give a girl a hard time. So adoption was never discussed; it might as well not have been an option. I’m not saying she would have made a different choice, but it really hammered the point home. An unpleasant, binary choice isn’t much of a choice at all.”

My existence clearly put my birthmother’s choice in the minority.

“That’s not always—”

“Her parents would have killed her, Buck. She was going to law school, not nursery school.”

I let a beat pass.

“Why hold the event in the Virgin Islands?” I could think of a hundred locations easier to accommodate travelers.

“My fundraising job taught me a lot about how to get celebrities to do things. It has to be something fun for them, or something that provides a lot of positive exposure. If you can do both, you increase the odds for success.” She shrugged. “Plus I dated one of the top leading men for a while—I learned way more than I ever cared to.”

Figures. Beautiful woman, living in L.A., high profile job with a well known charity organization. I wondered why it ended but didn’t ask.

“So why Jost Van Dyke? I love it, but it’s one of the harder islands to reach.”

She sat up straight in her seat.

“Last year, John and I took a bareboat sailing trip out of Tortola, no captain, just the two of us. We’d already started ISA and were getting nowhere with our efforts to arouse celebrity interest, so we were burned out. John had just gotten out of a nasty divorce when I met him, and he didn’t exactly leave the federal prosecutor’s office on good terms, so he was pretty down.”

“Good place to re-evaluate life, those islands,” I said.

I asked Crystal if his nasty divorce could have led to the threats. She crossed her arms.

“John’s first marriage was a disaster. His wife was nuts and he found solace in the arms of other women, but nothing happened that would make her want him to disappear—and if he dies, her gravy train ends, so that makes no sense.”

“Sorry. You were saying?”

“We first sailed to Norman Island, then Cooper and Virgin Gorda. We took our time and didn’t even talk about anything aside from what we wanted to eat, where we wanted to dive, and what we wanted to drink.”

She giggled, mostly to herself. I imagined her on the boat, seeing her through her own eyes rather than her husband’s—a smart, beautiful woman who had given up a successful and rewarding career for the man she loved. A pang of envy passed through me. My ex-wife had given up her modeling career for me, temporarily, but that’s because I was making gobs of money. When that ended, she was gone faster than I could count the number of designer outfits she’d left behind.

Crystal was different. The real deal. Her husband was a lucky man.

“And then we sailed the northern coast of Tortola where we got into a huge fight. John was ready to quit ISA but I knew he was frustrated, scared even—”

“Scared of what?”

“Failure. He’d never failed at anything, and suddenly things weren’t going as he envisioned. He just… lost it.”

She again went quiet. I waited.

“It was a turning point,” she said. “We’d hung out at Myetts on the Beach at Cane Garden Bay all afternoon and John had nearly drank an entire bottle of rum. He was very upset,