Page 33

CHAPTER 33

I woke at oh-dark-thirty disoriented and confused, not certain where I was. It wasn’t an out-of-body experience; it was most definitely in-body with my heart racing, my body sweaty, my chest heaving, terrified that the Godzilla that had been hunting me in my nightmare was going to stomp me out of existence no matter how hard I ran from it or where I tried to hide.

My eyes snapped open.

It was dark, just dim light filtering in the bedroom window. Something moved to my right, soft flesh against mine. I turned my head that way, trying to get my breathing under control, and remembered. Rose. Oddities. Rocky Start.

I hadn’t had the Godzilla dream in a while. I’m sure a shrink could make something of it. Being hunted by a massive force that I could only hide from but even then could crush me? Yeah, that represented something, I’m sure. Did it matter what it was?

I looked to my other side and there were two eyes staring at me and a dark snout gently breathing out warm air. Maggs was wide awake and standing by my side of the bed. I must have made some noise during my nightmare. I reached out and put my hand on top of her head.

Reassured, Maggs walked back to the foot of the bed to go back to sleep. I wasn’t as reassured.

And I needed the bathroom. Being a guy in your fifties is not a good time.

And I felt like total crap. The cold was in my sinuses, giving me a bad headache. I was not feeling chipper.

Rose stirred in her sleep and moved closer to me, all softness and warmth, her curls brushing my bare shoulder.

Sometimes it’s not a good time. Sometimes it’s great.

But I needed the bathroom. On my way back to bed, my phone buzzed and I grabbed it before it could wake Rose.

The screen said LUKE.

I answered and rasped, “Wait,” and checked the time. It was 0530, almost time for me to get up and walk in the woods anyway. I grabbed my clothes off the chair and went into the hall.

Maggs did not follow.

“What?” I said, when I was in Rose’s living room, far enough away from both bedrooms not to wake Rose or Poppy.

“There’s a car parked in front of Sid’s,” Luke said. “Three women went in. Dressed in black. Black baseball caps and wraparound sunglasses. They’re wearing sunglasses at night, Max.”

He sounded a bit offended by that breach of etiquette. I was offended by the memory of 80s music, but I said, “Great. On my way.”

Partnership. It’s a two-way street.

I got dressed in the hallway, went downstairs, grabbed my suppressed SW22 Victory pistol out of the ruck—it was early morning, after all, and I didn’t want to make a ruckus if forced into action—and locked the door behind me. The lights were on at Ecstasy next door, so Coral was baking. There was a pink Cadillac parked outside of Sid’s Pharmacy on the other side of Oddities. A convertible with the top up. Illinois plates. No one inside. Sid’s place was dark, so I angled across the street out of sight of his store and walked past Melissa’s to angle across again to Luke’s shop, keeping to the shadows. The town was so quiet, I could hear the water in the Little Melvin racing against the rocks to the south.

Luke was leaning against his storefront, invisible in the darkness under the window awning. He didn’t appear overly concerned. He was dressed in black sweatpants and a gray hoodie.

“You look like shit,” he said to me.

“I feel like shit. Now what?”

“What do you want to do?” Luke was motionless beside me. “If they’re robbing Sid, do we care? He won’t, he’s dead.”

“They’re after the cocaine or the money,” I said. “They’re one half of his connections. Or both sides.”

“Maybe Sid liked four-ways with women in sunglasses,” Luke said.

“Doubtful. He’d have to find three women who wanted him. Maybe they killed him? Maybe they know who killed him, or at least have information about who might have wanted him dead. At the very least, we’ll learn more about what he was up to that he shouldn’t have been. We should talk to them.”

“Yeah, they looked like women who wanted to chat.” Luke sighed. “But okay, let’s talk to them.”

“You have a plan?” I turned my head and sneezed into my sleeve.

“No, Marshal. I’m just the deputy.” Luke laughed silently. “I’m the muscle here, you’re the brains.”

“We’re both the brains, so think. How do we do this?”

“Got any zip ties?”

“Not on me. Rose probably has some in her apron pocket.”

“Guess I should have called Rose.” Luke pulled something out of his coat pocket and shoved it at me.

Heavy-duty handcuff zip ties. A half dozen. And strips of cloth for gags. I briefly wondered why Luke had handcuff zip ties and gags lying around, then decided that since he carried a Barrett .50-caliber sniper rifle in his electric minivan, it was a stupid question. A regular boy scout, Luke was. Always prepared. Or always ready. Or whatever their motto was. Always something. I’d been kicked out of the Boy Scouts my second week for something or other; I couldn’t recall, but it might have been not knowing the motto.

I imagine Luke had made Eagle Scout. He’d started planning as soon as he saw the car. I thought about asking him what he was doing up at five-thirty, but first we had three women to question. That was a bigger nightmare than the one I’d just had. There has to be a term for a pack of women dressed in black, like a murder of crows.

I drew my pistol and Luke nodded, drawing his own suppressed pistol—See? Prepared—and we started down the street. The lights weren’t on in the pharmacy, but they’d left the front door wide open, which had been nice of them. The better to make their escape, I figured. I slid inside, weapon at the ready, Luke flanking me. My eyes adjusted to the deeper darkness inside, and I could see that the front of the pharmacy was clear.

Luke nodded to the back, and we crept toward the open basement door, staying out of the shaft of light from Sid’s lab below.

“Honest to God, Hermione,” a woman said, her voice sharp and cutting. “You are the dumbest bitch in creation. Can’t you remember the damn combination? How many times have we done this?”

“I’m doing it right,” a smaller voice said. “I swear.”

“Move,” a third voice said, this one cool and confident.

I looked at Luke and he shrugged. Apparently, his preparation was good up until this point. I wasn’t sure what to do either. Going down those stairs was suicide if the women were armed and dangerous. Well, it was three women; that was always dangerous.

“Hermione’s right,” Cool Voice said. “The asshole changed the combination.”

“That’s what I said,” the little voice piped up, triumphant. “I was right.”

“Shut up, Hermione,” Sharp Voice said. “Go wake your little fucker up and bring him down here. I hate even looking at his ugly mug. I don’t know how you can stand him.”

Well, we now knew they hadn’t killed Sid. And they didn’t know Sid was dead, so they wouldn’t know anything about who killed him. That was a bummer. They were after the cocaine or money for the cocaine. Whatever. We’d cleaned out the safe and then shut it and the lock must have engaged.

We heard footsteps coming up. I felt the urge to sneeze and fought it back.

Luke and I, like the well-oiled team we had once been, slid back into the shadows. He pointed at me, indicating it was my play. I holstered my pistol, quickly wrapped one of the cloth gags around my free hand. Trying to cover someone’s mouth with your bare hand was likely to lead to a chunk of flesh being bitten off. I like my flesh as intact as possible. I readied a zip tie in my other hand.

A woman came out of the stairway and took a couple of steps toward the upstairs stairwell when I stepped behind her. I jammed the gag into her mouth while slipping one loop of the zip tie over her right wrist.

She made a little “oomph” noise into the gag, surprise more than anything else. She wasn’t fighting. She just stood there, a small woman, while I looped the left wrist then zipped her tight, hands behind her back.

Luke loomed up in front of her, as scary as Sasquatch in the dark. The woman had big eyes and tears on her cheeks now.

“If you’re quiet,” Luke whispered in her ear, “we won’t hurt you. Nod if you understand.”

She nodded, more of a tremor, really, and I pulled her away from the door. I pretty much carried her over to a heavy rack and used another zip tie to secure the one between her wrists to it, then rejoined Luke at the top of the stairs.

I went back to listening since we were now going to have to get the other two once they noticed the first one didn’t come back.

“You always stick up for her, Dora,” Sharp Voice was saying.

“You get too much pleasure from torturing her, Mal,” Cool Voice Dora said. “It interferes with the job.”

“Oh, like she’s a help.” Mal complained.

“More than you,” Dora said. “She does the job; she doesn’t stop to pull the wings off flies. And she’s taking too damn long.”

“I’m tempted to gut Sid for wasting our time,” Mal said. “This whole town gives me the creeps. There’s something off about it. Besides Sid.”

“Well, we agree on one thing,” Dora said. “The faster we get the coke and get out of here, the better. Go see what’s taking Hermione so long. I’ll be up in a second.”

I looked across the open doorway to the stairs at Luke. He held up one finger and then pointed at me, then two fingers and himself. He was giving me the easier of the two, the first one through the door. The second one would have a fraction of a second’s warning and might be more trouble.

I nodded. That was fine with me. Discretion and delegation are the better part of valor.

I readied a zip tie and gag.

The first woman, Mal, reached the top of the stairs and stepped into the shop, and just as she did, I sneezed. She grabbed for something inside her coat, and I tried the same routine I’d done on Hermione, but Mal was faster and bigger and had a sneeze warning. She ducked her head and all I managed was to mash her face with the rag as she yelled “Dora!”

I gave up on the zip tie as she was pulling a gun out from under her coat and went to the old standby of a heavy tap of my gun barrel on the side of her head. She had a tough skull and my angle was bad. She didn’t go down, but she was dazed enough that I was able to disarm her and zip-tie her. I shoved the gag in her mouth and tied it around her head.

There was the sound of a brief tussle behind me and I glanced over my shoulder. Luke had Dora zip-tied and gagged. I love it when we work as a team.

We pulled the two women over to Hermione.

Then I gave a mighty sneeze into my sleeve.

Luke turned on a light behind us, and I got a good look at our bag.

They were redheads with deep-set eyes and pointed noses and chins, clearly related. The oldest, Dora, the leader, was going gray; the mean one, Mal, had dyed her hair darker; and the little one, Hermione, was holding onto her twenties even though she must have been somewhere in her late thirties. They were all dressed in black, but Dora’s black was a practical high-coverage sweater, Mal’s black was a bomber jacket with a shirt under it showing a red bra, and Hermione’s black was a hoodie with a picture of Tweety Bird on it.

This was not good.

I reached out and pulled the gag out of Hermione’s mouth. “No screaming. You’ll wake the neighbors, and we’ll have to kill you.”

She nodded, blinking fearfully. Dora was glaring at her and trying to say something through the gag.

“Shut up,” Luke said to her in a reasonable voice. “It’s as easy to knock you out as leave you conscious. Your call and your headache later.”

I’d just threatened with death and Luke had ratcheted it down to unconsciousness. We had to work on our playbook, although his was the more reasonable and more likely. Still, he’d gotten soft. On the other hand, he hadn’t sneezed.

“Talk,” I said to Tweety.

“We’re just here to pick up the cocaine,” Hermione whispered, avoiding looking at her accomplices. As if committing a felony was no big deal. Then again, it was Rocky Start. “We’re not causing any trouble. This is a business transaction. We’re just couriers. When Sid gets back, he’ll tell you. It’s just business.”

“Sid’s dead,” Luke said, and Hermione looked at us both with eyes even wider. Dora frowned. Mal looked interested.

“So who killed him, Hermione?” I asked, and she started to shake, maybe because I knew her name.

Or maybe because she was tied up in a cocaine smuggler’s house staring at two guys who looked like Death who’d just told her that her boyfriend was dead. She probably thought we’d killed Sid, and I was fine with that misconception.

“All we want is information, Hermione, and we’ll let you live,” I began, and Hermione started to cry.

She wasn’t a good crier. Her face got beet red, and snot ran out her nose, and she started hyperventilating.

Luke shot me a look. We hadn’t decided on who was going to be good cop, bad cop beforehand, but I figured it was a given I’d be the bad one.

Luke leaned over in front of Hermione and used one of his spare gags to gently wipe her face clean. “It’s all right, Hermione. My friend was just being overly dramatic.”

“I’m never overly dramatic,” I muttered as I sniffled myself, but not over Sid’s death.

Luke looked the three women over, then shook his head. “We need backup. We’re going to Ecstasy.”

Hermione started to scream, and I jammed the gag back in her mouth and said, “It’s a coffee house. We’ll get you a Danish.” Luke had a point. One thing that had changed over the course of my covert career was that more women had started being brought in on ops, specifically to deal with female high-value targets.

Not that these were high-value targets, per se.

“We can’t get you a Danish,” Luke said, “because the bakery is German. But we’ll get you coffee and we’ll sit and you’ll talk. Everything will be fine.”

Really? He had to correct my call on the snack?

Hermione nodded and sniffled and I removed the gag.

“Okay,” she said.

I thought about it for a second. “Let’s call Coral to come over here. I don’t want them contaminating Ecstasy. And it’s too public.”

Dora looked offended, Mal still looked dazed, and Hermione was lost in stupid grief.

Luke sighed and got out his cellphone. “She’s not going to be happy to be taken away from her baking.”

“I’m not happy,” I said. “Are you?”

His big fingers moved swiftly over the screen.

“Tell her to bring some coffee,” I suggested.

“Right,” Luke said, typing. “She’ll be thrilled to get a to-go order.”

“Maybe one of those croissant things?” I added.

“German bakery, Max.”

“One of those small things with butter and cinnamon,” I said.

“ Franzbr?tchen ,” Luke said.

“Yeah. That’s it.”

“Oh yeah,” Luke said. “Coral doing take-out.” He typed a little more and hit send. “I copied Rose on it.”

Uh-oh. “Why?”

“We need someone with brains in here. Let’s take them down to the basement.

I think he might have just insulted me.