“You killed him.”

  “I told Frank to deal with it. I didn’t think he’d pump him so full of ED medication that he’d literally explode.”

  The limo stopped. Harry checked out the window. They were still on the interstate, at least a mile away from the Action News studio.

  “Why are we stopping?” said the president, though the question wasn’t really addressed to Harry.

  His door opened.

  “What’s going on?”

  Agent Schwartz was standing outside the limousine. He flashed his badge, his demeanor all business.

  “Sir, could you please step out of the vehicle.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Sir, don’t make this worse than it already is. Please step out of the vehicle.”

  The president chuckled nervously, but he was the only one laughing.

  “Harry, do you know anything about this?”

  Harry didn’t answer.

  Agent Schwartz said, “Sir, could you please—”

  “Yes, yes,” he said as he climbed out of the limousine. “But this is totally outrageous and insulting beyond belief. In fact, it’s inexcusable. I want your badge number.”

  Schwartz showed him his shield. “You have the right to remain silent. Everything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

  “Surely you jest,” said the president.

  “You have the right to an attorney…”

  “I don’t need to hear this,” he said. But the recitation of his rights continued, and the president only became more agitated. Two other agents from the motorcade approached the limousine, one of them with handcuffs.

  The president was red in the face with anger. Media helicopters were hovering overhead.

  “Do you actually think you can arrest me?”

  “Can I have your wrists, sir?” said Schwartz.

  “I won’t stand for this.”

  “Sir, your wrists.”

  “Is this some kind of political power play? This is—”

  He stopped himself, turned, and peered into the backseat of the limo. The door was still open, and Harry looked back at him.

  “You’re wired, aren’t you?” said the president.

  Harry said nothing.

  “You sneaky son of a bitch. You’re wearing a wire!”

  Harry drew on his oldest roots—those of a Miami cop—and forced himself to show no sign of enjoyment or satisfaction. In fact, he watched without any reaction at all as Agent Schwartz drew the president’s wrists behind his back and slapped on the handcuffs. But self-restraint had its limits. As the president stood outside his presidential limousine, glaring at the vice presidential nominee in disbelief, Harry couldn’t resist one parting shot—if not for himself, then for Phil Grayson.

  “How do you like those beans, Mr. President?” he said.

  Chapter 60

  Jack locked up his law office at 3:00 P.M. on December 22. The move to the new building on Main Highway was a success, at least according to Theo, who had quickly pointed out that the reception area was the perfect size for an air hockey table. “Situation normal” had returned to Jack’s life, just in time to be screwed up by the holidays.

  President Keyes had resigned from office on the day of his arrest, the first U.S. president ever to do so from a prison cell. With no sitting vice president, the Speaker of the House was sworn in as president, and he promptly nominated former U.S. attorney general Allison Leahy as his vice president. Harry Swyteck was out, just as Keyes had predicted. Jack had actually dreamt that he represented Sofia at her congressional confirmation hearing for the number two spot, but in reality she was happy to return to New York and pour what remained of her heart and soul into the bakery that she and her late husband Angelo had created.

  Predictably, the media—especially the talk shows—continued to feast on the White House scandal 24/7. Rumors were rampant, but there were some credible leaks. The last Jack had heard, Keyes might even identify a certain mobster who controlled him and Frank Madera, but only if the prosecution would cut him a deal on the conspiracy-to-commit-murder charge. Jack suspected there would be no deals if Elizabeth and Marilyn Grayson had anything to say about it.

  “Jack, hey, I’m glad I caught you.”

  Jack turned to see his father hurrying up the sidewalk. His Lincoln was at the curb outside Jack’s office with the motor running.

  “Mr. almost-vice-president, how are you, sir?”

  “Very funny.”

  “I thought you were leaving for Colorado today,” said Jack.

  “We’re off to the airport as soon as I pick up Agnes. But there was something I wanted to tell you before I go.”

  Jack knew what a nervous flyer his father was. “Dad, we have this same conversation every time you and Agnes fly together. I know where you keep the key to the safe deposit box.”

  “It’s not that. Before everything went crazy in Washington, there were more than a few jokes made about the fact that I fired you as my lawyer. The damn gossip papers even picked it up. I’m sure you realize what that was all about, but I feel like something needs to be said between us.”

  “I understand completely,” said Jack. “You were working with the FBI, and one member of the Swyteck family at risk was enough.”

  “That’s part of it,” said Harry.

  Jack flashed a hint of concern. “What’s the other part?”

  “I just want you to have the total picture. Yes, I fired you to keep you out of danger. But if this whole thing had turned out differently—if I had become vice president—it would have been a dream come true to have my son working in Washington with me.”

  Jack smiled, even though years of sad history lay between the lines. During Governor Swyteck’s first term, the problems had run much deeper than the obvious fact that Jack worked for the Freedom Institute and defended death row inmates, while his father was signing more death warrants than any governor in Florida history. The rocky history dated back to Jack’s childhood, and politics had made their disagreement so public that the two men didn’t even speak to each other.

  “Chief Justice Jack Swyteck,” said Jack. “Could have had a nice ring to it.”

  “Let’s not get crazy in hindsight, all right?”

  Jack stepped toward him, and they embraced.

  “Oh, one other thing,” said Harry. “I’ve completely run out of time with the holiday crunch. Can you stop by Carroll’s Jewelers and pick up Agnes’s Christmas present? It’s an antique, I guess you’d say. Make sure it’s cleaned up all pretty and overnight it to me.”

  “Sure thing. Have a great time in Beaver Creek.”

  Harry thanked him and went to his car.

  Carroll’s Jewelers on Miracle Mile wasn’t exactly on Jack’s way home, and the last-minute shoppers made getting there a bit like sneaking into the Super Bowl. Fortunately, the jeweler recognized him when he entered, and she brought the box to the counter straightaway and opened it for him.

  “What do you think?” she said.

  Jack slipped the ring onto the tip of his pinky and examined it beneath the spotlight.

  “It looks like my mother’s engagement ring,” he said, puzzled.

  “It is,” said the jeweler. “It cleaned up nicely, don’t you think?”

  Precious few family heirlooms had been passed down through Jack’s maternal family. His mother had come to Miami from Cuba as a teenager with little more than a suitcase in hand. The Castro regime didn’t let her mother leave for another forty years, long after Anna Maria Fuentes had married Harry Swyteck and died giving birth to a son. The modest, round diamond in a traditional Tiffany setting was about what one would have expected from a recent college graduate in the mid-1960s. Jack had never asked for it, but he assumed it would be his someday—passed directly from his father.

  “He’s giving it to Agnes?”

  The jeweler seemed confused by the question.

  Jack said, “My father asked me to come by and pick up his Christmas present to her.”

  The jeweler smiled, as if suddenly realizing what was going on. “Same old Harry the jokester,” she said, shaking her head. “I think you’d better read the card.”

  Jack took the envelope and tore it open. “I’m not good at surprises,” the card read, “but I think I got you this time. Give this ring to someone you love as much as I loved your mother. Happy 40th birthday.”

  Jack felt tingles, even if his fortieth had passed two weeks earlier. Still, it was an incredibly sentimental, un-Swyteck gesture coming from his father. A little pushy too, actually. Jack and Andie hadn’t even broached the subject of marriage, but it seemed that Harry was weighing in with his two cents: Approved.

  The jeweler put the ring back inside the box, no charge for the cleaning. Jack thanked her, went to the sorry rental car that had replaced another polished old gem—his 1968 Mustang, now junk—and headed for Coconut Grove to meet Andie.

  Maybe it had been Harry’s plan, or maybe it was the thought of being forty, but the ring got Jack to thinking. Andie Henning was unlike any other woman he’d known, a self-assured thrill seeker who liked to push life to the edge and lean over. Jack loved that she wasn’t afraid to cave dive in Florida’s aquifer, that in her training at the FBI Academy she’d nailed a perfect score on one of the toughest shooting ranges in the world, that as a teenager she’d been a Junior Olympic mogul skier—something Jack didn’t even know about her until she rolled him out of bed one hot August morning and said, “Let’s go skiing in Argentina.” He loved the green eyes she’d gotten from her father, the raven-black hair from her mother—and he loved that beneath the outward beauty, there was an intelligent and intriguing half–Native American who had been adopted into a totally Anglo world and who was as thirsty for knowledge about her own cultural identity as Jack was about his half-Latin heritage.

  His cell rang. It was Andie.

  “Change of plans,” she said. “Meet me at Cy’s.”

  Cy’s Place was special in Jack’s book, and the grand opening had proved to be the night that everything clicked for Jack and Andie. The two of them had talked and laughed till 2:00 A.M., listening to Theo’s uncle Cy give them a taste of Miami’s old Overtown Village through his saxophone.

  “See you in five minutes,” Jack told her.

  He arrived even sooner, but it took another five minutes in the parking lot to decide what to do with the diamond ring—hide it in the car or bring it inside with him. Car break-ins were rampant around the holidays, and the thought of his mother’s engagement ring ending up in some pawnshop was too much to stomach. The box was too big for his pocket, so he removed the ring and put it in his pocket—promising himself that, no matter how much tequila he drank, the ring would not see the light of Cy’s Place. Jack took the rear entrance through the kitchen and continued into the bar, where he was immediately greeted by a roaring “Surprise!”

  Andie threw her arms around his neck and kissed him.

  “Happy birthday, old man,” she said.

  Jack smiled, but he wasn’t really surprised, even if it was more than two weeks after his actual birthday. Telling Andie not to throw him a party had been the surest way to get one. It was wall-to-wall memories as Jack embraced one old friend after another—Theo, who gave him a spine-cracking hug; Uncle Cy, dressed in his vintage natty tweeds; Neil Goderich, his first boss at the Freedom Institute; and on and on.

  The longest hug, however, was for Abuela.

  She tried to whisper something to him, but the emotions choked her. As much as Jack resembled his mother, his fortieth-birthday celebration was at least on some level a tough reminder of how long it had been since Abuela and her daughter had said good-bye.

  “Drinks are on Jack!” shouted Theo.

  Cocktails were flowing all around the big U-shaped bar, and Cy’s Place was oozing that certain vibe of a jazz-loving crowd. Creaky wood floors, redbrick walls, and high ceilings were the perfect bones for Theo’s club. Art nouveau chandeliers cast just the right mood lighting. Crowded café tables fronted a small stage for live music. The hand-painted banner hanging from the ceiling, however, was a bit puzzling: HAPPY SECOND ANNIVERSARY!

  “Second anniversary of what?” said Jack.

  “Your thirty-ninth birthday,” said Theo as he filled two shot glasses with his best tequila añejo. “Cheers, dude.”

  Jack belted back one with him, and then Andie intervened, promising to make it well worth his while if he remained conscious tonight. Theo talked him into one more when Andie wasn’t looking, but Mexican brain-blaster number two put Jack in a serious, reflective mood.

  “What are you thinking?” said Andie, as she returned to the bar stool beside him.

  “Forty has been a pretty wild ride so far.”

  “You can say that again.”

  Theo came over in need of quarters for the pool table. “Dude, got any coin?”

  Jack glanced at the cash register behind Theo’s bar, but the point seemed too obvious to make. He emptied his pockets onto the bar top. The engagement ring poured out with his loose change, the diamond sparkling beneath the white LED lights. The sight of it nearly stopped Jack’s heart, and he snatched it up. Theo grabbed the coins and, as he walked away, Jack buried the ring back in his pocket.

  “What was that?” said Andie.

  “What was what?”

  She smiled. “That sparkly thing you just shoved back into your pocket.”

  “I didn’t just shove any sparkly thing back into my pocket.”

  Her smile turned seductive, and with an inquisitive tilt of her head a wisp of long dark hair fell into her eyes the way Jack found irresistible.

  “Jack?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can I see it?”

  “Nothing to see. Really.”

  “I want to see.”

  She reached for his pocket.

  He grabbed her wrist.

  She grabbed his elbow. “Jack?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you going to let me see? Or am I going to have to break your arm?”

  “I—uhm…”

  A saxophone bellowed, and Jack turned to see Theo coming toward him, his uncle’s old Buescher 400 in hand. A jazz solo quickly morphed into his rendition of “Happy Birthday.” The crowd began to sing, and suddenly Andie was leading Jack around the bar to a big cake with forty blazing candles.

  “…happy birthday, dear Ja-ack…”

  Andie came close and put her lips to his ear. “Come on, Swyteck. Just let me see it.”

  “Happy birthday to youuuu!”

  Acknowledgments

  “I’ve been orphaned,” I said to myself as I hung up the telephone. I had one published novel to my credit, and my editor had called to tell me that he was leaving HarperCollins.

  An hour later, the phone rang again. It was my agent, Artie Pine.

  “You’re going to get a call from Carolyn Marino. She’s a big fan of yours. You’re gonna like her.”

  That fan was my new editor. Over the next twelve years, Carolyn would guide me through fourteen novels of suspense. One of our most recent, and I think one of Carolyn’s favorites (she loved Uncle Cy), was Last Call. The title now seems prophetic.

  Amid the flurry of six Grippando novels in the span of three years, something happened on a less public level—the announced retirement of an outstanding editor at HarperCollins. She’d served the company brilliantly for eighteen years. More important (at least from my perspective), she groomed her stable of authors the way editors supposedly don’t anymore. Many she discovered as newbies. Others were household names. All are better writers today, thanks to Carolyn Marino.

  Carolyn is at least a foot shorter than my first editor at HarperCollins, probably less than half his weight. She’s thoughtful and soft spoken. Her range of knowledge is astounding. (Can you, in the same breath, debate the legal niceties of bonding out a criminal defendant and then tell me when Prada shoes became generally available in the United States?) Her manners are impeccable. Thank-you notes are always handwritten—never e-mailed—and I’ve never heard her cuss. If you didn’t know her, you might expect her to shush you at the library. You might even think the corporate world would eat her alive.

  You’d be dead wrong.

  “She’s good,” Artie’s son Richard had warned me. “And she’ll bust your chops.”

  She did, of course. Many times. But always politely.

  Carolyn loves books. That may seem like an obvious and unnecessary thing to say about an editor. Carolyn’s love is pure, however, and never cynical. Everything mattered—because everything could be made better. If it was time to start a new series, we talked about it. If my Russian mobster sounded too American, she’d tell me about it. If that scene with the python went a little too far, I’d hear about that, too. Her gift was in knowing when it was just right, whether it was the plot, a character, a sentence, or a word. Case in point: Intent to Kill (coming summer 2009). The first draft had my lead character take to the bottle after the tragic death of his wife. I thought I was creating the most engaging flawed protagonist since Paul Newman in The Verdict. “He’s passed out drunk with his six-year-old daughter upstairs,” said Carolyn. “I don’t like him.” He’s now a lovable insomniac in the best father-daughter scenes I’ve ever written.

  Sometimes Carolyn would tell me why a change was needed. Sometimes not. She just knew, even if she couldn’t put it into words. That bothered me at first. I was a lawyer before I was a writer. Reasons were important. As a writer, however, you soon learn that only the weak and insecure feel a need to explain every editorial decision in terms of right and wrong or good and bad. The best editors aren’t the ones who think their every hunch or impulse can be empirically justified. What you want is an editor who knows your body of work as well as you do, and who knows your audience even better than you do. Someone with the instinct and experience to predict what readers will want to read a year from now, and to recognize a character they’ll still love ten years down the road. A woman with the business sense to understand that even the best-written book doesn’t jump off the shelf, and the wisdom to discern the difference between a really good book and a really good book.