The Crimes of Jordan Wise by Bill Pronzini Read Free Book Online Page B

in bed in exchange for another tidbit of information. But I never gave in. There was no need. We were already doing most of what she offered as it was.
     
    The one thing we did discuss in detail, and often, was where we would go to start our new life together. Annalise's first choice was Paris, then New York, then the French Riviera or one of the Greek islands. None of those places appealed to me. New York was too expensive and the chance of recognition there too great. Paris and the French Riviera were simply too expensive. More than half a million dollars was a small fortune in those days, but you could go through it in a hell of a hurry in overpriced cities or jet-set playgrounds. My objection to a Greek island, to most locales where English was not the primary language and Americans not the primary inhabitants, was that U.S. expatriates with plenty of money and no visible means of support were liable to stand out. The last thing we could afford to do was to attract attention.
     
    She was disappointed, but she understood. When I reminded her that she could pursue her interest in fashion design from anywhere in the world, we moved on to other choices. Bali was one, Tahiti another. I liked those better, but they seemed too remote to Annalise. We both dismissed Hawaii. Too close to San Francisco, too many mainland tourists. And I still remembered how little I'd enjoyed the vacation trip to Maui.
     
    The Caribbean, the Virgin Islands had been my selection all along. They had all the tropical lures of sun and sea and laid-back lifestyle, they were a long way from California and drew relatively few visitors from the West Coast, they'd been U.S. possessions since the 1917 purchase from Denmark, and they were inhabited by English-speaking natives and a large percentage of American expats.
     
    Annalise was dubious at first. "I don't know anything about the Virgin Islands," she said. "Aren't they pretty isolated?"
     
    "Not at all. Close to Puerto Rico. Miami, too, for that matter."
     
    "Virgins. Why are they called that?"
     
    "Columbus named them Santa Ursula y las Once Mil Virgenes on his second voyage to the Caribbean in 1493. In honor of Saint Ursula and the Eleven Thousand Virgins, and because there are thousands of islands in the region."
     
    "Who were all those women?"
     
    "A fourth-century British princess and her sisterhood of maidens. All allegedly raped and massacred in Cologne by marauding Huns."
     
    "Lovely."
     
    "The islands are, yes. Wait until you see the guidebooks."
     
    The Virgins had two other draws for me. One I didn't confide to her because I was afraid it might worry her.
     
    Mixed in with all the positives was an element of risk that held a perverse appeal. The crime of embezzlement as I'd planned mine would violate U.S. banking laws as well as California state laws, and was therefore a federal offense. I would be a federal fugitive; the FBI would come into the case along with state and insurance investigators. If the Plan went off as designed, I had little to fear from any of them. No matter how much manpower went into the investigation, they would have a hell of a time finding me. The perverse appeal lay in the fact that the American Virgins were U.S. federal territory, and that meant the FBI maintained a local branch office there. The prospect of being a federal fugitive living off stolen money in U.S. government territory made me smile every time I thought about it.
     
    The other draw of the Virgin Islands for me I did tell Annalise about. "That part of the Caribbean offers some of the best sailing in the world," I said. "It's the reason a lot of people move there and vacation there."
     
    "Sailing?" she said.
     
    "I've always wanted to own a boat, learn how to sail."
     
    "You never told me that before."
     
    "Just a dream until now."
     
    "Well, I don't know, Jordan—"
     
    "Richard." I'd asked her to call me by that name on these weekend getaways. The sooner it became second nature to